Watching the Watchmen

I swear the title is the only “Watching the Watchmen” joke I will make in this review.

Last night, I went to see the Watchmen movie. You may have heard of it. It’s kind of a big deal.

Full disclosure before I actually start the review: I’m not a super-fan of the graphic novel. I saw the trailer in front of Dark Knight last summer, thought it looked cool and wanted to see it. I figured I should read the graphic novel before actually seeing the movie, so when I got back to school at the end of August I rented it from the library and read it then. I thought it was great, but that is the only time I have ever read it. I do remember a time in high school when my friend was reading it and she would let me read it when she had to go do other things, but when all is said and done, I have only read it once.

That being said, the movie, to me, did a great job of taking what I remembering happening on the page to the screen. The events that stood out to me were, for the most part, still there and the movie lived up to the hype I had been giving it. Of course, then I read the reviews.

For the most part, my personal experience didn’t agree with the reviews I had been reading. One of the biggest gripes of those reviews are that the soundtrack distracts from the film rather than adding to it, and I wholeheartedly disagree. The only real WTF!? moment I had with the music was when the Flight of the Valkyries started playing over the Vietnam war scenes. But, you have to take into account that no matter what, Watchmen the graphic novel is a satire, and that maybe the song choice there is a satire in some way in Zack Snyder’s head.

One review I read pointed out that in the novel the Watchmen aren’t actual superheroes. They are people who happened to don masks and fight crime. They aren’t super powered in any way and are just as vulnerable as the rest of us. This did seem to get lost in translation in the movie. In the opening scene, The Comedian was tossed around his apartment and through various hard surfaces, yet was able to take it. This seems slightly more than human.

But, you have to remember, this is a movie. It is an altogether different medium than a graphic novel. In a graphic novel you can read a pannel, read the next, read the next and so on, but if something catches your eye in a subsequent pannel that makes you recall something in a previous one, you can go back to that one to see the connection. You just can’t do that in a movie. It has to be constantly moving. That’s just inherent in the medium. That’s why Watchmen has been called unfilmable for so long, because the novel is pretty much is based on the idea that everything is part of everything else and you can go back and look and piece things together and see how they draw from one another. In essence, you can be Dr. Manhattan, seeing all things at all times. In a movie, that’s impossible.

But, the fact that Zack Snyder even TRIED to film it, and in many ways succeeded at it, makes this the best Watchmen movie anyone could make. Sure, he may have focused a little more on the action than was necessary, but at the same time, in a graphic novel, one punch only has to take up one pannel and that pannel can be studied for five minutes and mean something. That’s just impossible in a movie. The action has to continue in order to take up that five minutes, and I think Snyder realized that. You have to please the people who AREN’T fans of the graphic novel and just want to see a superhero movie. The balance between superhero movie and faithful adaptation was retained.

Yeah, I said it. It was a faithful adaptation. Did the characters in the movie have the same motivation as the ones in the novel? Some did, some didn’t. Was some of the humanity of the characters sacrificed to beef up the action? Kinda. Was the ending changed? You know the answer to this one if you’ve read anything about the movie. (It’s yes, by the way.) But, that doesn’t matter. Because they are two different mediums. You can’t get the same stuff across in a two-and-a-half hour movie as you can in a 400 page graphic novel. But Snyder tried and did a pretty decent job. It’s a great movie.

And for a novel that’s supposed to be unfilmable, Snyder sure as fuck filmed it.

A-

Coraline…Also, 3D movies.

So, I’m not going to write a lengthy review of Coraline. I think the 87% it has on Rotten Tomatoes says more than enough for it. I will only be repeating what almost every other reviewer before me said. It’s stellar. Henry Selick is a master at this stop-motion thing, and I love a movie that dares to challenge the conventions of the typical children’s movie. So what if it’s a bit scary for an 8-year-old. Life’s scary. Deal with it. (It’s at this point that I would like to point out that I think God did a great service to any potential future children I may have by making me gay.)

What I want to talk about is this whole 3D bandwagon that every movie seems to be jumping on. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think for some movies, and this movie especially, it adds something to it. If shot with the intent of being 3D and actually adding something to the movie instead of just being an effect, the results are beautiful. But, I think many movies are going to end up just using it as a gimmick. Take for example the preview for the third Ice Age movie (really, we need a third?). There was a leaf at one point that was almost real enough to touch, and it was coming right out of the screen in order for me to do so. But, was it necessary? No.

But, that’s not going to stop the movie studios from riding this bandwagon into the ground. So, while we are on the journey, I would like to propose some tips.

1. Give discounts to people who already have the glasses. Before leaving, I told my roommate I was going to see Coraline in 3D, and he told me he had a pair of glasses from going to see My Bloody Valentine 3D (He has a shitty taste in movies, but don’t tell him I said that.) So, when I took the glasses just wondering if I had to pay for another pair, the lady told me that, no, I had to buy the ticket and the glasses. She couldn’t just sell me the ticket. That got me thinking. If we are supposedly living in a time where the world is going green, why not reward people for recycling their glasses? Cut off the two bucks you have to pay for them and just sell us the damn ticket. It’s not like they are the old cardboard glasses of old, these things are plastic and durable. The should be able to be used more than once. If not, with this current barrage of 3D movies, people are going to end up with either a) piles of 3D glasses or b) throwing them away. Which, again, does not much to disprove my theory that “Going Green” is less of a lifestyle and more of just a saying.

2. Even though 3D is a great enhancement, please don’t rely on that to get people into seats. Give good stories. With characters we can relate to and fantastical situations that we can still somehow see a bit of reality in. Like Wall-e, but in 3D. I am going to see UP. Not because it’s in 3D but because it looks like a movie that will have heart and story and everything a great movie should have. Overlook the fact that I am a Pixar fanboy, please.

3. If you are going to make us buy new glasses for every movie, give us receptacles to put our glasses in at the theatre so they can be cleaned up and resold instead of being thrown away.

4. Watchmen in 3D would be SO COOL!

Okay, so that last one was less of a suggestion and more of me geeking out, but the point is, wouldn’t that be awesome?

I have good ideas, it’s a shame no one ever gets around to reading them.

Who wants to be a slumdog millionaire?

It is an important thing to set expectations when going to see a movie you have been dying to see. A mark of a good film is that it exceeds the expectations you set for it by miles. I think this was my main problem with Milk. I had expectations for what it was going to be and it met those expectations, thus making it a good movie in my book. Not great, but good.

Not so with Slumdog Millionaire. I had set expectations pretty high with this one. I knew it was riveting and moving and if it did just that, I would have been satisfied and called it a good movie. But, here’s the deal. Not only did it hit every single one of my expectations, it did so with such a subtle flair that it made me go ahead and push this film from a good film to a great film.

Getting this right out of the way, it’s predictable. The title alone gives away the end. And, it hits almost every benchmark for a typical romance story (boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, boy loses girl again, boy finds girl again but she can’t be with him, boy wins girl in the end.) But, I think that is part of the point. The point is to get the story out of the way so you can get to know the characters. 

And get to know the characters we do. Not only do we get to learn the reason that Jamal (Dev Patel) knows every answer on the show, we learn the reasons behind every action of every character. This is the mark of a great movie. The characters have depth. Not a vague type of depth. A real depth. Their story IS their backstory. You know the characters and you know what they will do. And, this is why when they do something that you wouldn’t guess they would do, it gets to you and moves you.

Take, for example, Jamal’s reason for going on Who Wants to be a Millionaire? When we first start getting his story, it seems that his reason for being on the show is for the money. Of course, he doesn’t seem like the type of person who is all about money, but when you put into perspective that when growing up an orphan, that was the way of life, it sort of makes sense. But, when it is revealed that the only reason he is on the show, in the hot seat, one question away from 20,000,000 rupes is just for the chance the CHANCE! that his long lost love will see him and find him. That’s when it hits you.

Granted, the movie does take a while to get to these types of hits. But, you can’t very well tell an entire person’s life story without at least a little exposition. And, even though at first the flashbacks seem to serve only to chop up the movie, when it becomes more clear that they are the movie, it just starts to flow.

It’s impossible to pick out one actor who really MAKES it flow, though. Everyone is so perfect. From the child actors, to the pre-teen actors to the adult actors. They are all pitch perfect. All perfectly motivated. Some by greed, some by lust, some by love. But they are all motivated. And, moreso than that, motivated by a character already existing in two other actors. That can’t have been easy. Not only did the three main actors (Dev Patel, Freida Pinto and Madhur Mittal) have to get motivation for what their characters were doing, they had to make sure it would synch up with youngest and middle versions of their characters. So, definite cudos to them.

Cudos all around, really. Danny Boyle directed this brilliantly. The screenplay by Simon Beaufoy was tight and pretty much awesome and just everything else was perfect.

The fact that the actors, the director, the everyone else could come together and not only make a film about a guy from the slums rising to fame and fortune, about the trials and tribulations of his life, about the hardships of the Indian people, but also imbibe it with such a sense of culture, hope and passion just puts this film over the wall of good into the territory of greatness.

The OxiClean show!

Billy Mays, the guy who is known for, you know, selling you things (most famously OxiClean) in commercials is getting his own TV show on the Discovery Channel.

Go ahead, read that sentence again. Take a sec to soak it in. The OxiClean guy is getting a TV show. Apparently, it’s called “But wait…There’s more” and it follows around Mays and Anthony Sullivan (another guy who sells stuff on TV. This one is known for the Swivel-Sweeper) as they find new products and try to sell them to the viewer.

I REALLY hope that when they say they are followed around, that the camera literally is following Mays and Sullivan as they peer through bushes and trek mountains and all those other adventurous things that treasure hunters do in search of the next great product to sell you.

And, I know this is asking for a lot, but I didn’t get much for Christmas and this would complete the Christmas list I didn’t know I had, but, it would be great if the products were sheer pieces of shit made by some backwoods guy out of some old gun and tractor parts he had lying around in his barn. Items such as the FlySwazzer, which is a hand held fly swatter that also electrocutes the bugs as you smash them or the Lamp SHADEZ…Sunglasses you put on when you absolutely positively HAVE to look at your lamp (or other various household lights) without wanting to ruin your retinas.

The possibilities of this show are endless. And, full of pure entertainment.

And, as a final wish for what this show could be. Every season finale HAS to end with Vince Offer (the shamWow guy) stepping in on one of the pitches and Mayes stepping in to battle him with all the crap he has had to sell over the last season. At the end, Vince is brutally beaten, but vows revenge as he limps back to his ShamWow van which then flies away.

I smell a ratings success.

MILKing it

I have decided that I need to start righting my wrongs in this new year. I don’t mean small wrongs like cursing out my siblings or driving like a less-than-decent driver. I’m talking about monumental wrongs. Like catching up on Oscar Bait movies (you know, the important things.) And, today, I set about doing just that.

As you can probably tell by the title…I saw Milk. I really wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire. It’s just that Milk was playing at two theatres and Slumdog Millionaire was playing at one and it was $9 against $12 and I’m a broke college student and…you get the picture.

Now, let me start my review by saying I love Gus Van Sant. I enjoyed Paranoid park and am probably one of, like, three people in the world who thought Elephant was a top-notch film. That being said, we can get into the review, which I apparently have been staving off for three paragraphs now.

Milk, for me, was not as good as everyone was saying it is. Well, I take that back. It is a good documentary/tribute to a great man and a great activist. As a film though, it flounders. Overall, it felt very choppy. The way the archival footage was kind of just thrown in at seemingly random intervals almost slowed the thing down for me. At times, it was good, and a good idea, but at parts I just felt as if it was going overboard. That’s not to say it came to a screeching halt. The movie never stops, which is good. It drives along nicely, slowing down at parts and going over some rough patches, but the actors never feel that.

Speaking of the actors, I will get to Sean Penn in a moment. First, I feel like I need to talk about the secondary and peripheral characters. There was not an actor that couldn’t keep up with this thing. Josh Brolin was superb as Dan White. I almost wanted the movie to be about him. But, then I realized that I would be seeing less guy on guy action and I don’t think I could handle that.

Emile Hirsch was also, for lack of a better term, fucking awesome. The tight jeans he wore helped me to pay attention, but he acted the shit out of that part and there are no pants tight enough to contain the awesomeness he brought to the screen.

And, a small side note, while we are on the topic of tight pants, and this is almost just a shout out to Van Sant…You had Lucas Grabeel in a movie that takes place in the 70s – the era of tight jeans – and not once, NOT ONCE did I see Grabeels ass crammed into a pair of those? For shame, Gus. For SHAME.

As for the rest of the cast, well, I don’t want to have to be up all night writing this, so I’m just going to say that there was not a single character that wasn’t acted brilliantly. The character of Jack was a little annoying (ok, I couldn’t stand it when he was onscreen and kind of did this thing where I just faded out everything he said,) but that stands as no reflection on Diego Luna. He isn’t a bad actor, Jack is just a bad character.

Then, we get to Sean Penn. What can I say that hasn’t already been said in numerous newspapers around the country? He’s brilliant in this role. Balances Harvey the lover, the politician, the activist, the friend so delicately, you almost just want to throw something else for him to be on there just to see if he can handle it. I only had slight problems here and there (again, only with the character, not Sean Penn,) but I got utterly lost in the portrayal and I would have a tough time distinguishing the actor from the man he portrayed.

And, just for a brief moment, I would like to talk about the score by Danny Elfman. Is there nothing the man can’t do? Frickin’ genius. There, that was brief enough.

I liked this movie. I really did. Would I pay to see it again? Maybe not. Was it the best film of 2008? No. Wall-e holds that spot in my heart still. Is it going to be my favorite film I see in 2009? Well, since Watchmen is coming out in March, (ON March 6. If it doesn’t, I will personally go to FOX HQ and yell at everyone in the building. DO NOT fuck this up FOX…DO NOT!) I don’t think so. But, it was still a good movie. Terrific acting, superb Script, great directing and a message that resonates with me almost personally. But, something just doesn’t add up and, in the end, I felt like I wasn’t sure what it was I had just seen. And, as a homosexual, that made me sad, because I wanted to have a movie I could hold onto and call mine. This just feels like a nephew I am looking after while my sister is on vacation. Close – but not mine.

For Your Consideration

Dear Academy.

I am going to start this letter off by coming out and stating that I may be a little bit biased in my perspective of the movies I am going to talk about. I am going to let it be common knowledge right now that I have not seen Milk, Slumdog Millionaire or Benjamin Button, but not for lack of trying. You see, I A) am a poor college student and B) I live in Missouri. The poor college student thing is, of course, not the greatest excuse because it shouldn’t be TOO difficult for me to scrounge up $12 to see at least one of these films, but this problem would be greatly alleviated if someone would pay me money to review films (I promise I would actually sit down and review it and not just take the money and run.) The second problem is a bit more complicated, because, you see, Missouri isn’t exactly known for its culture. Missouri is more known for having the kind of people who would watch Two and a half men enough to keep it on the air for however many god-awful seasons it’s been on.

However, this is not the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is that I want – nay – I NEED Wall-e to be at least nominated if not given the Oscar for best picture. And I believe the rest of the world needs it, too.

My love affair with Wall-e began pretty much the moment I laid eyes on the teaser for it in front of Cars (a movie I liked, but didn’t feel was up to Pixar’s normal standards.) I knew almost nothing about this movie. All I saw was a cute little robot flying around in space with a fire extinguisher and I was hooked. I had no clue what it was about, but I knew Pixar had something awesome up their sleeve for their next movie, and I was nowhere near wrong.

I saw it the day after it opened in a relatively empty theatre (this is no reflection on the movie itself, it was just a 10pm showing) and from the opening sequence of “Put on your Sunday Clothes” over shots of the galaxy, I was hooked. I was captivated when the camera then went to meet Wall-e doing what he does best – stacking garbage . I refused to take my eyes away from the screen for fear that I may miss something. Pixar had cast a magic spell over a 19-year-old  male. Who woulda thought? It made me laugh, it made me tear up (I don’t really cry, tearing up is as close as I get most of the time. Personal insight you didn’t really need but got anyway, for you.) But most importantly, it felt like this movie was going beyond entertaining me. It was reaching out into my chest cavity and warming my heart and rejuvenating my soul. 

THAT is why Wall-e should be nominated for Best Picture. Because it did exactly what movies should do. It made the viewers own humanity come to live in themselves. It entertained, yes. It did that extraordinarily well – moreso than I ever could have wished. But, it went beyond entertainment. It made love between robots real. It made people think, if not about the environment and their effect on it, then about their own interactions with other people. It made people all warm and fuzzy inside. It did more than, I think, any other movie this year did (again, refer to paragraph one THEN come back and tell me I should really see everything before I judge or compare.) 

I don’t think this movie should be relegated to the Best Animated Feature category. It is so much better than that. Not to mention the fact that it will be zero competition over there. Off the top of my head, the only other animated feature that came out this year that was decent was Kung-fu Panda. Now compare that movie to Wall-e, and you will see my point. 

Wall-e needs to be in the best picture category so that there will be some kind of competition for the award. TDK was AWESOME and I believe it did almost as much as Wall-e did for movie-goers this year. It, too, made them think and entertained them. I am not sure if the heart was all there, but it was a great movie and an excellent contender.

I won’t labor too much on the other contestants only if for the reasons I have talked about in the first paragraph. But, I will give a brief sentence on each to give some sort of acknowledgement to these films.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE – Has amazing reviews and is on many best of the year lists as the #1 film, and also #1 on my list of films I need to see.

MILK – A film about the last great gay-rights activist by Gus Van Sant? Sign me up.

BENJAMIN BUTTON – From the mixed reviews I’ve read, I gather it is a good film, but didn’t exactly live up to the hype.

There is no reason that Wall-e should not be a Best Picture contender along with the rest of these movies. Just because it’s animated, doesn’t mean it’s not a great movie. Plus, the last and only time a film has ever been nominated for Best Picture was Beauty and the Beast back in 1992. That is WAY too long. It is time to stop segregating the movies. If a movie is good enough to be in the Best Picture category, fucking put it there. And, damn it, Wall-e is amazing and deserves it. 

Please and thank you,

Jack

This is why I love Neil Patrick Harris

In the 2nd “Don’t Vote” ad, I ran across this little gem. Sure, there are other celebrities I admire in the video, but the one that sticks out to me is Neil Patrick Harris. I really do admire and respect and most importantly look up to him. An openly gay man with this much exposure and respect? Sign me up.

Why I admire NPH from Jack Luecke on Vimeo.