The Screengrab : alan moore

In Defense of Watchmen

Andrew Osborne — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:16:00 GMT

So, I finally got around to seeing Watchmen last night, and I certainly agree with many of the opinions blogged previously by my esteemed colleagues Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark, i.e.: “There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made,” and also, “That said, the movie is far from a disaster.”

True, there’s way too much voice-over, the faux-Nixon proboscis is like a bad Saturday Night Live sight gag and the audience at the screening I attended actually burst into derisive laughter in response to the instant cliché usage of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” during what would otherwise have been a perfectly lovely sex scene between Patrick Wilson’s Nite Owl II and the va-voomy Malin Akerman’s Silk Spectre II.

And I can’t imagine what I would have made of the movie if I wasn’t already familiar with the source material: the numerous backstory digressions killed the propulsive, race-against time whodunnit nature of the plot (in a way they didn’t in the graphic novel), and even with North Korea actually launching missiles in the real world, the original work’s haunting sense of impending doom never felt as vivid in the film...mostly, I think, because I was more emotionally connected to my memories of the characters on the page than the oddly flat performances unspooling before me on screen.

To read Watchmen is to spend a decent amount of time with the various inhabitants of Alan Moore’s alternate reality universe up inside your head, from the heroes to the innocent bystanders they’re supposed to be “protecting” (like the newstand guy and the kid with the Tales of the Black Freighter comic, who make only blink-and-you-miss-it cameos in the film). But it’s hard to share the elder and junior Nite Owls’ nostalgia for crime-fighting camaraderie when all we’ve really seen of it is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Comedian mowing down gooks and brutally raping Carla Gugino’s Sally Jupiter...itself a vividly unpleasant scene that undoes the character’s later, seemingly straight-faced longing for the old days.

And yet, and yet...for all its flaws, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen at least aspires to art, and the sheer improbability of its existence is kinda breathtaking: a pointy-headed, existential think piece on the nature of good and evil (and the miracle of life) uneasily coupled with everything from standard CGI superhero action to naked tits, a big blue schlong and a child’s corpse being devoured by dogs....the fuck?

Compared to cynical drek like, say, The Spirit (or the atrocious Sam Hamm adaptation of Watchmen that thankfully never came to pass), Snyder’s fealty to Moore’s vision is quixotic, fascinating and (for me, at least) never boring despite its titanic running time. And unlike the misguided yet entertaining Troll 2-esque passion projects of the midnight cult movie circuit or muddle-headed misfires like Howard The Duck and The Last Action Hero, there’s plenty in Watchmen that legitimately works, from the big prison break set-piece to Jackie Earle Haley’s marrow-chewing Rorschach and the eye/brain candy of Billy Crudup’s Dr. Manhattan.

So who should watch Watchmen? Hard to say, really...I’m just glad that I did.

Related Posts:
Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”
Screengrab Review: Watchmen (Paul’s Take)

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: March 14-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Greetings, sentient life form. I am the Evil Donkey Kong Machine in the Screengrab break room, and all your Highlight Reel are belong to me. Humans are notoriously unreliable, as you no doubt noticed when you tuned in last Friday and there was no Highlight Reel to be found. Apparently, the humans would prefer to gather in groups and consume mass quantities of alcohol rather than fulfill their obligations to you, the Screengrab reader. This will no longer be tolerated. If you’ve read Clippy Strikes Back: The Scariest Technology in Cinema History (Parts One, Two, Three and Four), you know the consequences will be very unpleasant for those who have failed you.

Prior to being dispatched to the Soylent Greenatorium, your Screengrab scribes somehow managed to cobble together a respectable collection of SXSW reviews, including: American Prince, My Suicide, Me and Orson Welles, Humpday, Beeswax, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, Best Worst Movie, Pontypool, Along Came Kinky and The Slammin’ Salmon.

Before having their brains removed and replaced with a cybernetic gelatin, the humans also contributed the follow posts of note:

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)

Reviews: Monsters vs. Aliens, American Swing, We Pedal Uphill, Goodbye Solo, Guest of Cindy Sherman

Unwatchable: American Ninja V, Zombie Nightmare, Troll 2, Son of the Mask

Precursors: Next and Mars Attacks

Screengrab Q&A: "American Swing"

Roger Ebert Knows What’s Worth “Knowing”

Bound for Gory: David Carradine Takes No Prisoners in Rep Screening Appearance

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

The Screengrab Library of Unproduced Screenplays: Alan Moore's "Fashion Beast"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

A Screengrab Plea: Let Herbie Ride Again!

Phil Nugent — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

The superhero-movie trend wasn't going to die on the vine in the unlikely event that Watchmen-the-movie bombed, and the word on the street is that it didn't bomb, so if you fancy yourself a leading man, you'd better look good in spandex. New potential franchises have already been lining up on the tarmac; a while back, we reported that the job of directing a movie about the mighty Thor has been handed to Kenneth Branagh, who I'm sure will do every bit as well by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as he did by Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, and Rita Rudner. I can't help but feel, though, that a golden opportunity is still sitting on the shelf there, continuing to be overlooked. I think we've pretty well established that Alan Moore makes for box office, and who has Alan Moore named as his own personal favorite superhero? Herbie, that's who! Herbie, Herbie Popnecker, Herbie the Fat Fury! The scarily bearded bard of Northampton is not alone in his idolatry. There has long been a teeming, steaming cult of Herbie brewing just below the demarcation line we call common sense. But where's our movie? Every so often, lo these past several years, word has gotten out that someone in Hollywood has given the greenlight to a Herbie movie. The pattern is always the same: dancing breaks out in the streets, the good champagne is uncorked, strangers hug each other in Times Square, babies are conceived. Then the morning after arrives and it turns out that the movie is about that damned Volkswagen again.

The creation of writer "Shane O'Shea" (a pseudonym for Richard E. Hughes, editor of the independent comics publisher ACG) and artist Ogden Whitney, Herbie first appeared in the December, 1958 issue of ACG's Forbidden Worlds. A product of that patch of suburbia that would later cast its siren song at David Lynch and John Waters, he was a round little boy with a bowl haircut and a pair of eyeglasses that were the liveliest thing on his poker face. A man of few words, Herbie seldom spoke up except to wave his trademark sucker at people and threateningly inquire, "You want I should bop you with this here lollipop?", a tag line that would later be tightened up and employed by TV's Kojak. Herbie's super powers--including a mighty punch, a menacing stare that could, and did, break the devil, the ability to communicate with animals, and a knack for time travel that helped him to become recognized as a hero and savior to many different civilizations throughout history--were firmly in place from the outset, while he was just waddling about in his Sansabelt slacks. Eventually, though, feeling that he had some responsibility, as the star of a comic book, to try to fit in with the superhero community, he did create for himself the alternate identity of the caped avenger the Fat Fury, flying through the skies barefoot with a toilet plunger on his head.

Like many a pulp hero, from Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel down to Superman, Herbie was in a way his own rival, scorned by a love object who admired the Fat Fury without ever guessing that he and the seemingly inadequate Herbie were one and the same. In the case of Herbie, the love object in question was no fair maiden but Herbie's gruff and clueless father, whose open loathing of his offspring seemed to cause Herbie little distress. At the same time, the legions of panting women who offered themselves to our hero, none of whom showed much conern about the fact that he was theoretically too young to be dating, had no effect on him either. As you might expect of a young man who was frequently seen to cut class to make a special meeting with Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, he had his mind on weightier matters. In a recurring development that has probably inspired more than one graduate thesis in the field of Cultural Studies, women who had been spurned by Herbie often ended up running off with the livestock, as if just knowing that Herbie was out there somewhere had ruined them for the human race.

Will there ever be a Herbie movie, ideally one directed a safe distance from Kenneth Branagh? Herbie fans have learned to be disappointed. ACG went under in 1967, three years after Herbie finally got his own book. In 1992, Dark Horse boldly announced that it was bringing out a 12-issue Herbie series consisting mostly of reprints from the long-gone ACG books; it crapped out after two issues were published, making it the Big Numbers of reprint series. Herbie later made a guest appearance in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot comic, but this was after the magic had gone from both characters, and the results were sort of like those end-of-the-road appearances by the Three Stooges, where the spectacle of men in their late sixties poking each other in the eye seemed less like a cause for amusement than a desperate cry for help. The good news is that Dark Horse has finally done penance for having whiffed in 1992 by bringing out the complete ACG Herbie comics in three hardcover volumes, the last of which comes out next month. These handsome hardcover editions retail in the neighborhood of fifty dollars apiece and would cheer up anyone who needs to unwind after a long argument with the landlord about when the rent check will clear. Now that this material is readily available, maybe some Hollywood A-lister will finally see the potential that starring in a Herbie movie has to take his career to the next level. I don't mean any particular Hollywood A-lister, it could be any Hollywood A-lister, oh, any number of kaff kaff Philip Seymour Hoffman kaff Hollywood A-listers could have a triumph in the role.

The Screengrab Library of Unfilmed Screenplays: Sam Hamm's "Watchmen"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

[If there's one subject that holds more fascination for film geeks than the movies they've seen or are planning to see, it may be the movies that have not been made and may never will be: the scripts that go into permanent turnaround or excite some interest, only to be abandoned. A few of these attain the status of legends, a process that in the last several years has been exacerbated by the ability to disseminate them through the Internet. Because a screenplay is a physical object but also a blueprint for something fuller and richer, which would probably end up deviating from the script at any number of key points, reviewing unfilmed scripts is a movie critic's form of cryptozoology, kind of like examining a muddy footprint and trying to sketch Bigfoot from it. This week, to kick off our new series dedicated to the unicorns, mermaids, and moderate Republicans of the movie world, the Screengrab looks back at the "Watchmen"-the-movie that might have been.]

When Warner Bros. which owns DC Comics, started looking for someone to adapt its property Watchmen to the movies, it must have seemed a natural choice to call in Sam Hamm, who had written the script for the 1989 Batman, a movie that commercially kick-started the superhero-comic-book movie genre. Hamm's Batman script, which was rushed into production without benefit of the polishing it would have received had not the 1988 Writers' Guild strike intervened, is not without its problems, and if there's a comics convention going on near you, I can introduce you to several people who'd be overjoyed at the chance to list them for you. But it also has Hamm's freshly thought-out take on its hero, which laid the psychological foundation for Michael Keaton's performance and, to a great extent, much of the batlore that's come since.

As Hamm would later write, he considered young master Wayne's having elaborately built his life around the murder of his parents and concluded "that Bruce had become Batman as a result of being spoiled. He had grown up with sufficient money and leisure to luxuriate in his own tragedy, to wallow in the false sense that it made him somehow unique. In other words, Bruce had never learned to cut his losses. For good or bad, he'd become addicted to his own pain—and he relied on the outward nobility of his mission to conceal the true perversity of his addiction. In this psychological scheme the Batman persona would function both as a symptom of, and justification for, his madness. To keep it alive, he'd have to relive the death of his parents again and again, killing them anew each night." This sort of talk must have made it seem as if Hamm would be a natural soul mate to Alan Moore, who'd made his name in the American marketplace by applying his own nasty insight to such stock characters as Swamp Thing and the Joker. In fact, Hamm's earliest involvement in the project overlapped with the days when Moore and DC Comics were still on speaking terms, and after Hamm made a pilgrimage to Northampton to sup with Rorshach's creator, Moore declared that he had "complete faith" in him. What neither of them may have grasped is that, whatever Watchmen needed to successfully navigate its way to the big screen, a sharp reading of the motivations of a fifty-year-old pop myth was not among them. Long before Zack Snyder came calling, Watchmen had a reputation for being unfilmable, and watching Hamm try to wrestle it into shape points up some of the reasons for that.

[Please note: while it may seem odd to attach a spoiler's advisory to a discussion of a script that was never filmed, it is impossible to discuss the Watchmen that didn't get made without mentioning the details it shares, and deviates from, the movie that was finally made and the comic book it started out from. Consider yourself warned.]

Moore's Watchmen is set in a specific time and place--his fantasy of an America that is a very different place from the America of the 1980s because a repressive U.S. government has had access to a superpowered figure Dr. Manhattan, who was able to keep a lid on things and shut down the cultural and political explosions of the '60s and '70s. It is also a product and reflection of a specific time and place: America in the actual mid-1980s, when it was fashionable to sneer at those explosions and even to try to pretend they hadn't happened. It was also a time when nuclear jitters, exacerbated by the last tremors of the Cold War, seemed to color everything. The first thing anyone trying to adapt Watchmen has to figure out is, what time is it set in, and what version of that time? Hamm's script opens with an action sequence set during the 1976 Bicentennial celbrations. Some terrorists inside the Statue of Liberty have taken hostages and are threatening to kill them and blow up the monument. Riding to the rescue are our heroes, Nite Owl, Rorshach, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, and Adrian Veidt--Moore's Ozymandias, who in an ominous geature is called "Captain Metropolis" here--who have a contract with the government to fight crime and who are banded together under the group moniker "The Watchmen", a name that never actually appears in the comic book. The fact that our heroes actually fight under the handle in the script is our first strong indication that Hamm has a healthy willingness to make drastic changes in the source material to make it fit the new medium. It is also our first strong indication that he kind of doesn't get it.

In Moore's Watchmen, people have been running around in homemade costumes fighting crime since World War II; it's the accidental creation of the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, whose powers are soon put to service rendering the U.S. government beyond question, that has rendered them obsolete. Hamm eliminates most of the alternative-historical background, so that here, it seems as if Dr. Manhattan's appearance might have inspired others to turn to free-lance heroism, a career option that is shut down after things go dreadfully wrong at the Statue of Liberty. (He also deploys the revelation that Richard Nixon is still president, which Moore announced at the outset of the comic to help set its tone, as a late-inning shockeroo.) Except for Dr, Manhattan's origin story and the revelation of what pushed Rorshach over the edge, Hamm dispenses with Moore's intricate flashback structure. The predecessor versions of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre are gone, and after the murder that announces our jump to 1986, so is the Comedian; he's mentioned in passing a few times (never affectionately) but never seen again, and the news of his special connection to Silk Spectre never arrives. Hamm floorboards it to the end, which even die-hard fans of the comic have been known to concede has always been "problematic." In the original, Adrian Veidt obliterated part of Manhattan to scare the world powers into working together; in Hamm's rethinking, Veidt decides that in order to prevent an apocalyptic Cold War confrontation, he has to kill the indestructible Dr, Manhattan, a hat trick that involves producing some kind of time ripple through which he can prevent Dr. Manhattan from ever having existed, this negating the preceding couple of decades. When he succeeds, the central heroes find themselves deposited, in full costume, in the "real" New York of 1986.

Loopy as all this is--and it is sufficiently loopy to have guaranteed that any mention of the script garners howls of derision from fanboys coast to coast--it's worth keeping in mind just what Hamm was up against. The script, too, is a dated relic from a specific time and place: i.e., a Hollywood where comic book movies were now seen as potential cash cows but not prestige ventures, before Time magazine had included Watchmen on its list of the 100 best novels published since 1923. And the era in which the comic first appeared and the time in which Hamm was cobbling together his adaptation had been separated by its own time ripple: the cordial meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev had effectively killed the nuclear-clock atmosphere that the comic was a part of, even before the Berlin Wall came down. Hamm was taking an instant period piece and trying to find a way to keep it making sense, presumably with a contractually mandated running time of two hours or thereabouts.

In between the new opening and the changed ending, he serves up a sort of Cliff's Notes of the most excitingly filmable moments from the comic, and some of the new details he adds--such as the "Vietnam War Memorial" that resulted from Dr. Manhattan's quick winning of that war, a statue of the big blue bastard cradling a fallen soldier in his arms--catch the flavor of the comic to a T. He also performed a few cosmetic changes on such scenes as Rorshach's origin nightmare, concocting a gruesome new punishment for the masked vigilante to inflict on a child killer. (This was probably a necessary touch, since in a movie, it would be harder to ignore the fact that Moore had stolen the original scene wholesale from George Miller's Mad Max.) Less to his credit, Hamm also had Rorshach making Leno-worthy wisecracks about clogged toilets and street mimes. Even the scenes he retained and did justice to don't mean as much without the background Moore provided, especially since the connective tissue between them and Hamm's altered framework is thin and flimsy. But there's a bigger problem: the changes Hamm made conventionalize Watchmen. Terry Gilliam, who produced another draft with his co-writer Charles McKeown before concluding that there was no way to accommodate all the detail necessary to make a Watchmen movie that would be meaningful and comprehensible in the space of an acceptable running time, complained that Hamm's script just seemed like a bunch of superheroes running around, and he was not wrong.

The script for the current Watchmen movie is credited to David Hayter and Alex Tse. Tse is said to have worked from a pair of efforts Hayter wrote years ago, with an eye to eventually directing the movie himself. Hayter, too, had to grapple with the same road blocks as Hamm, the time period and the ending, and he apparently discarded the former only to have the current team bring it back. The new Watchmen was made according to rules that no one could have anticipated twenty years ago, namely a director with the inclination to make a film that would be as close a physical approximation of the comic book as possible (and the muscle, after the success of 300, to get the studio to go along with him), and a new entertainment business climate full of adults who grew up thinking of the comic as a masterpiece and who'd could envision an audience who'd want it treated not just respectfully but with slavish fan-worship. Confronting Nite Owl at the climax, Adrian Veidt accuses him of "a lack of vision", and that's the problem with any movie version of Watchmen whether the would-be adapter tinkers with the source material or solemnly traces over it. Whatever the billboards insist, it's a vision that somebody else already had, more than twenty years ago.

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:30:00 GMT

The Worst:

CATWOMAN (2004)

Attacking Catwoman is almost too easy: it’s such an obvious, defenseless target, what with stinking up the box office like week-old kitty litter, damaging the careers of all responsible and winning Razzies for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Director (for “Pitof,” if that IS your real name) and Worst Actress for Halle Berry (whose Golden Raspberry acceptance speech alone very nearly redeemed both her performance AND her embarrassingly overwrought Oscar speech for Monster’s Ball, including gems like, “First of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, God-awful movie . . .it was just what my career needed”). But...nope, we’ll never be done kicking Catwoman, for oh, so many reasons. Geeks hated the flick (set in “Lake City” rather than Gotham) for heedlessly violating the sacred mythology of the source material, straight guys hated the way Berry dishonored the legacy of Kitt, Newmar, Meriwether and Pfeiffer by somehow making Catwoman (CATWOMAN!!!!!) distinctly unsexy, fashionistas hated the godawful costume, feminists hated the fact that while male superheroes were out saving the world, Berry’s crusader was investigating a frickin’ cosmetics company and right-thinking people everywhere coughed up hairballs of disgust to discover the whole tacky disaster somehow managed to cost 100 million dollars. But even worse is the nagging sense of how totally awesome a good Catwoman movie might have been...and how we’ll never, ever get to see it now. Thanks a bunch, Pitof.

FROM HELL (2001)

If you think Zack Snyder had a dense, intricate Alan Moore work on his hands when he set about adapting Watchmen, consider what the Hughes Brothers stepped into when they decided to bring Moore’s graphic novel From Hell to the screen. A speculative fiction based on the legend of Jack the Ripper, From Hell is an insanely detailed look at an alternate Victorian England and the massive conspiracy at its heart. It’s endlessly fascinating stuff, and the Hughes Brothers threw away just about all of it in order to make a nonsensical Se7en-style serial killer bloodbath. Johnny Depp is the police investigator, who is given opium-induced psychic powers here that he never possessed in the comics, while that great British actress Heather Graham plays the cockney prostitute he romances. The entire plot has been re-jiggered into a lame whodunit, thus jettisoning almost every unique aspect of Moore’s take on the Ripper story. It’s not shocking that such minutiae as the extensive tour of London’s Masonic architecture wouldn't make it to the screen, but keeping the Ripper's identity a secret throughout the movie only robs the story of its most interesting character. Worst of all, Hughes and Hughes don’t even bother trying to recreate the look of the comic – the whole sooty, early-Industrial vibe. From Hell looks like it was shot on the set of a Batman movie, which is probably what the brothers would have rather been doing in the first place.

BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997)

After the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton, Warner Bros. put the Batman franchise in the unsteady, garish hands of director Joel Schumacher, who told everyone within earshot that he wanted to return to the "campy" tone of the old Adam West series, as if daring everyone in earshot to scream at him, "What're ya, high!?" Schumacher's first Batman movie, Batman Forever, which featured Tommy Lee Jones giving a performance that would have embarrassed Rip Taylor and Chris O'Donnell capering in his underoos and declaiming, "Holy twisted metal, Batman!", was one of the worst big-budget horrors ever, and damned if the old boy didn't manage to top it in his follow-up. Pre-release word on the movie was terrible, but Schumacher stubbornly continued to talk it up until his megaton bomb hit theater screens, inducing pain and suffering in all who had eyes that see. Schumacher reacted defensively at first -- "I had no idea that putting nipples on the Batsuit and Robin suit were [sic] going to spark international headlines," he pouted, in stubborn denial of the likelihood that people were trying to be nice and the nipples were the least objectionable thing about his movie. By then it was clear that, in the summer comic-book movie sweepstakes, the Caped Crusader had gotten his nuts crushed by Men in Black, a movie based on a comic little read by people outside the artist's and writer's immediate families.

DAREDEVIL (2003)

With X-Men and Spider-Man having solidified its status as king of the superhero-film hill, Marvel must have thought itself invincible, because only hubris could possibly explain the comic giant’s decision to okay Mark Steven Johnson’s take on Daredevil, the blind lawyer who combats crime at night. From the cheesy tone, to Johnson’s habit of turning his camera on extreme angles, to the miscasting of Ben Affleck, to the soft-core love scene featuring Daredevil and Jennifer Garner’s sexy assassin Elektra, Daredevil is a fiasco through and through, turning its hero into a second-rate Batman whose every extraordinary leap, jump and twirl is the byproduct of lame CGI. Johnson shoots every action sequence with maximum spasticity, setting his fights in rain and strobe lights and editing them to ribbons. Stuck headlining this misbegotten adaptation, Affleck vainly attempts to act tortured by flashing a variety of grimaces, all while an overacting Colin Farrell attempts to devour any scenery in sight as the hysterically corny villain Bullseye.

THE SPIRIT (2008)

With The Dark Knight proving in 2008 that it was possible to make a truly great superhero movie, it was actually kind of a relief to have Frank Miller remind us that same year that it was still possibly to make a truly rank one. Miller himself is one of the greatest comic artists and writers the industry has ever seen; though his work has been spotty in recent years, in the 1980s, he put out a fistful of some of the greatest superhero stories in the history of the medium. As a director, though, he’s a hell of a banjo player. Utilizing the same tricks he relied on in Sin City, but with a notably weaker cast and a downright rotten script, he took the Spirit – a venerable crimefighting character created by the beloved Will Eisner – and stuck him in a movie that would have to be twice as good as it is to be an embarrassment. Sidled with an incoherent screenplay, a tone-deaf sense of mood and pacing, a lot of wasted femmes fatale, and Samuel Jackson in one of the most deranged (and not in a good way) villain roles in recent memory, The Spirit would have been a disaster regardless, but the final nail in the coffin was the casting of charisma-free nobody Gabriel Macht in the lead role. Macht brought a Twinkie-heavy sense of anti-gravity to the Spirit the likes of which we haven’t seen since a young fellow named Klinton Spilsbury donned the mask of the Lone Ranger in his first, and last, motion picture role. Miller’s lucky he built up so much credibility in his comics career, because movies as crappy as The Spirit have ruined lesser men.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Salutes The Best & Worst Comic Book Movies Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

It’s Watchmen Week here at The Screengrab as the greater Geek-iverse (and the studio executives who love it) await the opening of Zack Snyder’s much-anticipated, much low-expectations-generating adaptation of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’ beloved, game-changing graphic novel about a bunch of asshole “super” “heroes” fighting crime, mental illness and erectile dysfunction in a scary alternate reality where Richard Nixon never went away. (And by the way, does everyone out there already know Silk Spectre II: Electric Boogaloo is portrayed by the same actress who played Valerie Cherish’s little blonde protégé on The Comeback? I just found that out, like, yesterday and was momentarily confused because I thought all the Watchmen were supposed to be kinda middle-aged -- but then I checked the Internet Movie Database and, much to my surprise, Malin Akerman’s actually 31, which is somewhat middle-aged, I suppose)...

Anyway, our own Scott Von Doviak and Paul Clark have already weighed in with their reviews of Hollywood’s latest attempt to wring a little KA-CHING! out of the POW! ZAP! BAM! of the funny book aisle, a strategy that’s been serving the Suits pretty well in recent years. I could pontificate here on the way America’s fascination with caped crusaders panders to infantile, imperialist empowerment fantasies, crowding more intelligent, adult material from the multiplex...but not only would that be annoying, it would also be hypocritical, since (A) I like a good funny book movie as much the next geek, (B) another movie about masked superheroes battling supervillains is a helluva lot better than another movie about masked sadists chopping up teenagers and (C) I keep hoping they’ll someday finally make that Wonder Woman movie I’ve been waiting for since I was 12. Mmm...magic lasso...

In the meantime, though, please enjoy the following list from Nerve.com’s very own Legion of Doom as we salute truth, justice, the American way and THE BEST AND WORST COMIC BOOK MOVIES OF ALL TIME!

The Best:

IRON MAN (2008)

True, it’s only been a few weeks since I wrote about Jon Favreau’s rock ‘em sock ‘em revival of the venerable Marvel Comics rust magnet for my Best of 2008 list...but (unlike certain awards-distributing Academies I could mention), I wanted to make sure this excellent film was recognized among the best of the best!

V FOR VENDETTA (2006)

Don't tell Alan Moore, who has never seen it but took the trouble to bad-mouth it anyway, but this adaptation of his Thatcher-era anarchists' fable, directed by Wachowski brothers proxy James McTeigue, does better than pretty good by its source material. The most important changes the filmmakers made from the original text, notably the transformation of Eve's (Natalie Portman) blokey boyfriend into a sardonic gay TV host played by Stephen Fry, actually work well: Fry's performance gives the film some heart, and film is clearly better suited than the printed page when it comes to paying gratuitous tribute to Benny Hill. The movie even inspired David Denby to apoplexy by seeming to present a terrorist as a political hero. Annoying David Denby is always a public service.

HULK (2003)

Remember how last year’s Edward Norton re-boot of The Incredible Hulk was going to prove that the relatively disappointing box office take of the 2003 Hulk was all Ang Lee’s fault? That audiences would embrace a louder, faster, dumber Hulk movie in a way they never did Lee’s artsy-fartsy one? How’s that working out for ya? The 2008 edition racked up almost exactly the same box office total as the 2003, so maybe it’s just that nobody likes poor ol’ Hulk. Or maybe the 2003 version wasn’t so bad after all, which is what I’ve been saying all along. Yes, it has its flaws; Eric Bana doesn’t exactly light up the screen, the CGI star isn’t quite up to snuff in some scenes, and things do take a little longer to get percolating than was perhaps necessary. But Lee brings a lyrical, haunting tone to the picture that may seem at odds with the whole “HULK SMASH!” ethos, but actually taps into a vein of melancholy the character has always possessed. The innovative editing scheme, with its cascade of digital wipes and split screens, is a far more clever and entertaining cinematic analog to reading a comic than anything Zack Snyder does in Watchmen, and the CGI effects do mesmerize at times. Hell, I could have watched this Hulk bouncing his way across the desert for hours.

X-MEN 2 (2003)

Ushering in the modern age of Marvel superhero films, Bryan Singer’s X-Men helped prove that the sight of men in tights – or, in this case, men and women in leather body suits – didn’t have to doom a comic adaptation to cartoonishness. It was Singer’s 2003 sequel, however, that truly elevated the genre by cannily marrying romantic drama, vigorous action and social-intolerance subtexts (here reconfigured from the source material to address sexuality more than race). Aside from Halle Berry’s still-awful wig and Alan Cumming’s grating Nightcrawler, X2 is sharper, smarter and more exhilarating than its predecessor, remaining true to the spirit of its heroes, villains and Dark Phoenix-ish storyline, buoyed by Brian Cox’s superbly villainous William Stryker, and smartly placing as high a premium on character as on spectacle. Which isn’t, however, to say that the spectacle itself isn’t reason enough to check out Singer’s sequel, since an early Stryker-led attack on Professor Xavier’s school, as well as Wolverine’s climactic throwdown with Lady Deathstrike, more than ably deliver the super-skirmish goods.

BATMAN (1989)

A genuine pop culture behemoth in the summer of '89, Tim Burton's blockbuster comic book movie probably did more than any other to make comics adaptations an accepted Hollywood genre, if only for proving that the success of the first couple of Superman movies hadn't been a fluke. This is not one of those accomplishments that nobody can see a downside to, and despite its hellacious popularity, the movie has always had enough attackers to count as controversial, including those who think it's a clumsy piece of storytelling to comics geeks (including Kevin Smith) who think it blasphemed its source material in any number of ways. But Burton's graphic sense and gothic sense of humor always made it a striking, strikingly funny piece of work, and facts are facts: no actor has ever been more compelling or convincingly haunted in a superhero role than Michael Keaton. The passage of twenty years and umpteen sequels and reboots (including Burton and Keaton's deeply flawed but often lovely Batman Returns) has thrown its defects and pluses into sharp relief: it's hard to remember that, in 1989, when Christopher Nolan was all of nineteen years old, many critics were appalled because they thought this picture was too dark.

SUPERMAN II (1980)

The 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman was an outlier, and probably the earliest example of filmmakers at least trying to make a genuinely good superhero movie. But it wasn’t entirely successful, and one sticking point for a lot of fans was the performance as Lex Luthor by Gene Hackman. The role has as many passionate defenders as detractors, but many thought that it was overly campy and unserious, and a superhero movie is generally only as good as its villain. The 1980 sequel would change all that. Introducing three Kryptonian supervillains escaped from the Phantom Zone – the hulking Non, the ice-cold Ursa, and best of all, the fantastic Terence Stamp as the megalomaniacal General Zod – Superman II gave us villains for the ages, and culminated in one of the most exciting fight scenes we’d seen to date. But it still wasn’t a great movie, and longstanding rumor placed the blame on the firing, when production was nearly complete, of Superman director Richard Donner and his replacement with Richard Lester. Lester, while a talented director, didn’t much care about the job and had little affection for the material, and the results are right there on screen. A few years ago, however, the Richard Donner cut was released commercially, and it finally became clear how good Superman II could have been if its original director had been allowed to pursue his vision all along.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Nick Schager, Leonard Pierce

Screengrab Review: Watchmen (Paul's Take)

Paul Clark — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Well, it’s finally here, folks. After more than two decades in development, Watchmen is finally hitting screens nationwide this weekend. In a way, it’s sort of miraculous that it actually panned out. Of course, the road hasn’t been easy, with a seemingly endless parade of directors, screenwriters, producers and stars attached to the project at some point. But to me, it’s even more interesting to observe how comic book culture has progressed to this point. Just over a decade ago, it seems like Batman was the only comic getting the blockbuster treatment, and just about everything else was played for campy nostalgia, e.g. The Phantom. Hell, back in 2000 studios were worried whether the X-Men could sell tickets. So the fact that there’s not only a massively budgeted adaptation of Watchmen out there but also one that’s surprisingly faithful to its dense, ambitious source material just shows how far comics- and comic-book movies- have come in the last ten years. If only the movie was better, this saga would have the happy ending that all Watchmen fans crave.

Admittedly, Watchmen is a tough nut to crack. Combining a murder mystery, a deconstruction of superhero mythology, and a meditation on society brought to the brink of apocalypse, it’s a far cry from the classic potboilers of yesteryear. Even in an adaptation as close as this one, some material would inevitably be pared away (so long, “Tales of the Black Freighter”). But while director Zack Snyder has sworn fidelity to the original graphic novel from the beginning, it’s one thing to visually translate Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ creation to the big screen, and another entirely to turn it into something cinematic. And although Snyder pulls off the former, he falls short of the latter. It looks great, but it never quite works as an honest-to-goodness movie.

Part of the problem is that Snyder never manages to reconcile the inherent expectations of comic book blockbusters with the more literary aspects of Watchmen. There’s plenty of violence in the graphic novel, but to me the action has always taken a back seat to the ideas and themes. Watchmen is less about its heroes’ powers than about their differing ideologies and the way they’re brought out, not only by their circumstances, but also by the times in which they live. This idea that even mankind’s saviors are complex and troubled is a potent one.

Unfortunately, Snyder doesn’t explore this idea in much depth. It’s a shame, since there’s a lot of potential here, especially among the more “freakish” members of the group- Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), essentially a masked Travis Bickle; The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), an aging Captain America gone to seed; and “quantum hero” Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose sad plight has led him to grow ever more detached from human concerns. But while these characters are pregnant with possibilities, Snyder instead makes the least interesting Watchmen- the second Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and Night Owl II (Patrick Wilson)- the central players in the drama. It doesn’t help that Akerman’s performance is easily the worst in the movie- she can’t even convincingly gasp for air when she first arrives on Mars- or that Wilson is saddled with a look that makes him look less like Gibbons’ creation than a young Chevy Chase.

But if Snyder doesn’t quite get a grasp on the thematic and subtextual undercurrents of Watchmen, he doesn’t make it work as a straight-up comic book movie either. Oddly enough, some of the blame should be placed on Snyder and his insistence on taking his visual cues straight from the graphic novel. On a shot-by-shot basis, the film is often remarkable to behold, but in putting them together, Snyder and editor William Hoy too often fall back on the shot order used in the graphic novel rather than editing the film in a way that allows scenes to build naturally and in an exciting way. The result is a film that feels like it’s been frozen in amber, beautiful but difficult to embrace.

That said, the movie is far from a disaster. In fact, there’s still plenty to admire about Watchmen, beginning with Snyder’s attention to detail. If nothing else, the visuals of Watchmen are eye candy to fans who’ve longed for years to see this story brought to life. And some of performances are actually quite good, especially those given by Crudup, Morgan, and Haley, who not only feels just right as Rorschach but also even delivers his trademark “hurm” perfectly. Less successful is Matthew Goode as the formidably intelligent Ozymandias- Goode looks and acts the part well enough, but the role really needed some big-star charisma to make it sing, and it’s a little disappointing to think what Tom Cruise, who was allegedly interest in playing the role, might have done with it.

When I saw Watchmen the other night, I was accompanied by someone who’d never read the graphic novel but enjoys darker comic book movies like The Dark Knight. And while I couldn’t help but judge the movie in comparison to the original material (and frankly, doesn’t Snyder more or less invite this?), my friend was able to enjoy the film on the screen, unburdened as he was by expectations. I think this contrast is illustrative. If you’re in the market for something more than the usual heroes-and-villains comic book thriller, Watchmen might just hit the spot. But if you’ve seen this story play out in its ideal medium, any other version will be inherently disappointing. My only hope is that maybe some of those who enjoy the movie will be inspired to pick up the graphic novel, so they too can experience this material the way it was meant to be experienced.

Screengrab Review: “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

There are a million reasons a Watchmen movie should never have been made and no good reason it should have, aside from the obvious one: superheroes are big box office, and Watchmen was one of the most tantalizing untouched superhero properties available. It’s also an incredibly dense, multi-layered work, deriving much of its power from its subversion of five decades worth of comic book conventions. Having read the script Sam Hamm penned for Terry Gilliam’s aborted attempt at mounting Watchmen for the screen back in the early ‘90s, I know the new adaptation of the acclaimed graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons from “visionary director” Zack Snyder isn’t the worst case scenario. Nor does it exceed expectations. It’s just sort of pointless, which is what most fans of the classic comic have probably been expecting all along.

So can we separate the movie from its source material and judge it on its own merits? We can try, but Snyder doesn’t make it easy. It’s not a good sign when the movie kicks off with the image of an aging Richard Nixon portrayed by an actor wearing a ridiculous putty ski-slope nose and tons of awful aging makeup, quickly followed by a “Pat Buchanan” who looks and sounds exactly nothing like Pat Buchanan. The set-up here, should you be completely unfamiliar with the world of Watchmen: it’s 1985, and Richard Nixon has been re-elected to an unprecedented fifth term as President. Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union are at an all-time high, and nuclear war appears to be inevitable.

The events of this alternate timeline have been aided and abetted by costumed heroes, among them The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who helped lead the U.S. to quick victory in Vietnam. As Watchmen opens, the aging Comedian is murdered in his own apartment, leading masked vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) to believe that someone is picking off the Watchmen, a superhero group whose members also include dumpy Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), sultry Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), and superhuman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, boasting a pendulous blue schlong that may disturb and frighten younger viewers – or any viewers, really).

In the comics, Moore and Gibbons amplify the major plotlines concerning the hunt for the mask-killer and the quest to avert global armageddon with flashbacks to the heroes’ origins (some of which date back to a superhero team of the 1940s called the Minutemen), along with various subplots including a love triangle among Silk Spectre, Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan and a prison detour for Rorschach. To their credit, Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse include as much of this material as possible (the Watchmen comic-within-the-comic Tales from the Black Freighter is getting a separate DVD release)…so why does the 168-minute running time still seem bloated beyond all necessity?

Part of it comes down to your definition of what constitutes a “faithful” adaptation. Great swaths of dialogue are lifted intact from the graphic novel, and the major visual set-pieces are painstakingly recreated (with at least one notable exception), and that may be enough to satisfy a segment of the audience. But the pacing is often leaden, the plotting lumpy and disjointed, the storytelling single-layered at best. The connective tissue between the big moments is thin to nonexistent; for instance, viewers coming to the movie cold may be forgiven for wondering how a sketchy character like Ozymandias (Matthew Goode and his dreadful wandering accent) turns out to be so crucial to the proceedings. Snyder seems most fully engaged when the action is at its most conventional, as when Nite Owl and Silk Spectre rescue kids from a burning building or Rorschach fends off assailants in prison.

Watchmen does have its moments. The closest it comes to capturing the texture of the graphic novel is the lyrical sequence in which Dr. Manhattan, having exiled himself to Mars, relives the events that led to his transformation into a godlike being. There’s visual razzle-dazzle to spare: an arctic fortress, a demolished city, a massive clockwork gizmo floating above the surface of Mars. And Jackie Earle Haley is terrific – he knows he’s playing a Clint Eastwood character times five, and he brings the appropriate psycho gusto to lines like “I’m not locked in here with you – you’re locked in here with me!”

I’ll even give Snyder some credit for improving the ending slightly, which wasn’t difficult (blasphemy, I know, but I re-read the last two Watchmen issues last night just to refresh my memory and that is not good stuff). But I can’t think of too many “visionary” directors who would use so many obvious, overplayed music cues (the love scene set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” is snicker-out-loud embarrassing) or cast so many nonentities in major roles (the listless Akerman is the worst offender). His approach is depressingly literal, and none of the scenes build on what has come before – they’re just meticulously reconstructed Scenes From Watchmen. It took more than 20 years to bring his most famous work to the big screen, and now Alan Moore isn’t the only one wondering why anybody bothered.

Dave Gibbons on "Watchmen-the-Movie": "Far Better Than Anyone Could Have Reasonably Imagined."

Phil Nugent — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:30:00 GMT

As you may have heard, Alan Moore, the writer of the 1986-1987 comic book series Watchmen, is so disenchanted with both Hollywood and DC Comics (the company that published the comic back when Moore was their official house genius) that he wants nothing to do with promoting Zack Snyder's movie version. It turns out that (as Michael Ordoña reports in the San Francisco Chronicle) Dave Gibbons, the other half of the comic's creative team, isn't so bashful. Gibbons says, "people say, 'Did you do any drawings for the Watchmen movie?' And I say, 'Thousands of them ... 20 years ago.' " Snyder has made a lot of noise about this being a faithful adaptation, and since movies and comics are both visual story-telling media, for Snyder that means duplicating the look of what was on the printed page, transferring it to the big screen, and setting it in motion. (That was basically his strategy with his movie version of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 300, too.) Gibbons, who calls the movie "far better than anyone could have reasonably imagined," says that "when you draw a comic book, you kind of have a movie in your head. You try to focus in and isolate one frame of what you're seeing. This is a bit like seeing that movie, but in the real world. You're going, 'That's that picture you drew; that's another picture you drew.' " Looking forward to watching it on DVD, he adds, "you can go back though and pause and look at the background because there's a lot of resonance in there. What Alan says about the graphic novel is, 'Everything in it means something. There's nothing put in there just to put it in.' And that's so with the movie as well. Even down to quite obscure background dressing, it all has some connection."

For his part, Snyder, who seems to have a healthy mutual-admiration thing going in with the cartoonist, says that Gibbons has "been a strong ally in bridging the gap" between the comic and the movie. Having Gibbons on hand as a consultant helped embolden Snyder in those decisions where he felt he had to deviate from the sacred text a bit. Gibbons says that "There's one scene in the film that isn't in the graphic novel that Zack wanted to see how I'd visualize. So I actually drew three new pages, which I got the original colorist, John Higgins, to color, so they looked absolutely authentic." Snyder and his production designer Alex McDowell also wanted to improve on the image of Dr. Manhattan's glass palace on the moon, so, the director says, "We hired this guy, he was like some atomic scientist, to design the original clockwork - it got modified from there, but it had this crazy scientific backing. There's a lot happening in that thing if you actually look at it. It's got this kind of corkscrew down the center - and in the director's cut you see it better, but when Manhattan and Laurie are walking up the stairs, there's no stairs in front of them. They come in under their feet, and as soon as they step off, they fold back into the machine." But for the most part, the chance to see Watchman come to life, looking much as Gibbons drew it, seems to have reduced the director to pure fanboy. One thing the production has given him has been the chance to have Gibbons at his ear, "from a creative standpoint, saying, 'Yeah. That's Watchmen. ' It's been really cool."

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Precursors: The Incredibles (2004)

Nick Schager — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:00:00 GMT

There are plenty of superhero comics (and cinematic translations of them) which would ably prepare moviegoers for this weekend’s immensely anticipated Watchmen. Yet those itching for an inkling of what director Zack Snyder’s adaptation holds in store would be well served to first check out Brad Bird’s 2004 Pixar gem The Incredibles, which borrows quite a few elements from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ landmark 1986-1987 graphic novel. While Bird’s film is less an elaborate, self-conscious deconstruction of superhero fiction than a high-flying celebration of family, it nonetheless grounds its tale in a contemporary world where – as in Watchmen – do-gooders (here with bona fide paranormal powers) have been forced by an ungrateful public into retirement, and where they now attempt to live mundane lives while suppressing their urges to don tights and fight crime. Furthermore, Bird’s story features ordinary citizens driven to copy their costumed idols and a villain created, in part, from the decisions made by the righteous Mr. Incredible – similarities which clearly reveal this superlative kids film’s debt to Moore and Gibbons’ work. Whether Watchmen will be as fully realized as The Incredibles is a question soon to be answered, but there’s little doubt that Bird’s first CG-animated effort (following 1999’s The Iron Giant), equal parts heart, humor and exhilarating action, puts most of its superhero-movie brethren to shame.

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Feb. 21-27, 2009

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

It’s a beautiful day for a Screengrab post, a beautiful day in the Screengrab!

Hello, boys are girls! How are you today? I am fine! Today we’re going to visit the marvelous land of make-believe! First we’re going to explore the Screengrab’s Ultimate Exploitation Films (Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six)! You younger boys and girls will need a note from your parents.

Next we’ll enjoy a magical Unwatchable Recap (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five)! All of you boys and girls will need a note from your psychiatric counselors.

Are you still with me, boys and girls? Hold on tight!

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Precursors: Street Fighter

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Alan Moore’s Stealth “Watchmen” Campaign

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:00:00 GMT

You may have noticed that Alan Moore isn’t doing a lot of press in support of the Watchmen movie. If you’re familiar at all with Moore and his usual m.o., this doesn’t surprise you. Moore has distanced himself from pretty much all the previous adaptations of his work, including From Hell, V for Vendetta and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so why should Watchmen be any different? But maybe we’re looking at this all wrong. Maybe Moore is actually employing some reverse psychology, some of the mind-bending trickeration that makes his comic book work so compelling, in order to convince us all to see the Watchmen movie. Let’s examine this new Wired interview with Moore for clues.

“I think that adaptation is largely a waste of time in almost any circumstances,” says Moore. “There probably are the odd things that would prove me wrong. But I think they'd be very much the exception. If a thing works well in one medium, in the medium that it has been designed to work in, then the only possible point for wanting to realize it on ‘multiple platforms,’ as they say these days, is to make a lot of money out of it. There is no consideration for the integrity of the work, which is rather the only thing as far as I'm concerned. I've got enough money to be comfortable. I live comfortably, I can pay the bills at the end of every month. I don't want a huge amount of money by diluting something that I happen to be rather proud of at its outset. That pretty much describes my attitude toward the idea of any of my works being realized in another form, really.”

OK, so maybe he’s building his way up to telling us that Watchmen is one of the rare exceptions? “With a comic book you can dart your eyes back to a previous panel, or you can flip back a couple of pages to check whether there is some reference in the dialog to a scene that happened earlier. You can also spend as much time as you want absorbing every image. This is especially true of something like Watchmen, where I was trying to take advantage of Dave Gibbons' brilliant capacity as a former surveyor for including incredible amounts of detail in every tiny panel, so we could choreograph every little thing. The little symbols and signs appearing in the background, every little touch could be choreographed to the last detail, and we knew that the audience—because they'd be reading at their own pace—would be able to study each panel and to take in these almost subliminal details. Even the best director in the world, even a person as talented as Terry Gilliam, could not possibly get that amount of information into a few frames of a movie.”

Surely the twist is coming now. He’s about to tell us how it could actually be done. “When we did meet—which was mainly just because I thought it would be really good fun to meet Terry Gilliam, and so it proved—Mr. Gilliam did ask me how I would go about translating Watchmen into a film, and I said to him, ‘If anybody had asked me, Terry, I would have advised them not to.’ I think Terry is an intelligent man and came to that conclusion himself. And I think he said something to that effect, that he thought it was something probably best left as a comic and shouldn't be made into a film.”

Oh, well. So much for that theory. If you want to read more from Moore, including some tidbits on his upcoming novel Jerusalem, check out the Wired interview.

Counting Down to “Watchmen”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Can you feel the excitement building? Yeah, me neither, but there’s nothing we can do about it: Watchmen will be arriving in theaters two weeks from Friday and we’ll just have to ride out the hype together. It’s already proven too much for our regular Watchmen correspondent Leonard Pierce, who is currently receiving treatment in an undisclosed location, so I’m filling in for him today with the latest in Watchmania.

British tabloid The Sun has an exclusive clip from the film, which runs approximately 90 seconds and appears to have been chosen completely at random. “Superheroes battle to save men, women and children from a burning building in our explosive exclusive from Watchmen. Nite Owl II (PATRICK WILSON) and Silk Spectre II (MALIN AKERMAN) fly to the rescue in the hottest Superhero movie of the year.” It’s hard to believe they could have picked a more generic scene, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

“There is a press blackout on reviewing the Watchmen movie until March 6,” writes Matt Selman of Time.com magazine before going on to review the movie. Or as he puts it: “Don't worry, I'm not going to write a review of Watchmen. What I am going to write about is the emotional experience of seeing a piece of literature with which I have an intense personal connection LITERALLY COME TO LIFE. It's a serious freak-out… I'm not allowed to talk details, but let's just say it is astounding how much of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' graphic novel is in this movie… Sitting in that screening room and watching the visual world of the Watchmen movie unfold was one of the most powerful experiences I've ever had.” So we’ve got the pull-quote: “Astounding! Powerful! A serious freak-out!” But don’t worry, it’s not a review.

Here’s the trailer for Tales from the Black Freighter, the adaptation of the comic-within-the-comic that will be released on March 24:

Finally, if you’re just trying to kill time before the movie opens on March 6, why not play the online videogame? It’s supposedly replicating a 1977 arcade game, but it looks suspiciously 1983 to me.

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FOX Lawyers: The Smartest Men on the Cinder

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:45:00 GMT

Movie nerds like myself, who have invested what little remains of their self-identity in the remote possibility of Watchmen not being terrible, were thrown into a major tizzy a few months ago when FOX Studios, which claims to own the rights to any and all future movie adaptations of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons superhero classic, moved to legally block Warner Brothers from releasing the Zack Snyder film.

Many felt this would be an epic moral battle where FOX exerted their rights in the labyrinth of complex entertainment laws to protect their rightful property regardless of future plans, while fending off the ire of pissed-off fans; others thought that it would be a titanic legal showdown where Warner allayed incomprehensible facts and figures in a desperate attempt to prove themselves on the correct side of the law and get their movie out on time. Others, like your humble correspondent, figured that it was basically just FOX making a bunch of noise, based on a slender bit of legalese, in order to wring a fat payday out of what's widely predicted to be one of 2009's top-grossing films. As Mania.com is reporting, well...one of us was right.

FOX and Warner Brothers are both reporting "productive talks" in the attempt to settle this thorny legal issue, which means that both company's lawyers kept writing dollar amounts on a piece of paper until they arrived at a figure that was mutually more than you will ever make in your life. In case you're really curious, ugly details of the whole money-grubbing mess -- in which producer Larry Gordon accuses FOX of pushing the entire thing to make a buck -- can be read at the Hollywood Reporter's legal blog. What was it someone once said about everyone having their hands in the next guy's pockets?

We Watch the Watchmen...and Watch, and Watch, and Watch...

Are We Ready for We3?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 19:15:00 GMT

We do our best to keep you updated about comics-to-film adaptations here at the Screengrab, but it's rare that we get to bring you news of a good comic being adapted for motion pictures. (And when we do, we're usually pretty nervous about it; see the last half-million posts we've made about Watchmen.) We were a bit surprised when it was announced recently that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's critically acclaimed DC/Vertigo miniseries We3 was set for a big-screen pickup -- but not as suprised as we were when further details started coming in.

We3 is a strange property from the start. On the surface, it's a funny-animal tale, but it very quickly takes exceedingly dark turns that belie its Incredible Journey trappings. It's a brilliant, highly moving story, and its ethical stance is one of unabashed animal rights advocacy. And it's a visually dynamic book, with remarkably intricate art from Scottish artist Quitely that complements and enhances the writing by Morrison, probably the most highly praised author in comics since Alan Moore. Its visual style -- described by its creators as "Western manga" -- would seem to make it a perfect fit for animation, so it was shocking when Warner Brothers announced it would be a live-action production. To add bafflement to perplexity, the website Mania is now reporting, based on an interview with producer Don Murphy, that it will be directed by John Stevenson, best known for Kung Fu Panda.

There's a lot to make fans nervous about a big-screen version of We3; will gunshy producers dilute the animal rights message? Will the money-hungry studio dumb it down to appeal to family-film audiences? Will the story's violence get toned down? But with this latest announcement, subtle questions like that get swept away in the speculation that Murphy and Warner don't even understand the basic format: why make a live-action movie of a story so perfectly suited to animation -- and, if you're determined to make a live-action film, why hire a director best known for his work in animation? We'll keep you posted.

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Watchmen 2?

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:45:00 GMT

There's not much you can rely on in comics anymore these days. Lois Lane and Clark Kent finally got married, Spider-Man unmasked in front of the world, Lex Luthor became President of the United States, and the Rawhide Kid turned gay. But there's still two things you can count on: the dead don't stay dead, and any comic that turns a profit is going to get a sequel.

One of the few exceptions to the latter rule has been DC's legendary mini-series, Watchmen. Generally considered the most highly acclaimed superhero comic of all time, its critical reputation helped fight off the demand for a follow-up engendered by its relatively high sales figures. (One might also argue that author Alan Moore's wishes, combined with a fiendishly ambiguous ending that seemed to disallow the very notion of a sequel, might have something to do with it. But Moore doesn't own the property; DC does, and since his rancorous departure from the company, they've never been particularly interested in his opinion on the matter, as evidenced by the large number of movies and TV shows based on his stories, but without his name in the credits.) But with interest in the upcoming movie version of the comic driving sales to a record high, and the motion picture industry in the habit of booking sequels years in advance to films they merely suspect are going to be hits, Comicscape takes up the question: are we inevitably going to see a Watchmen sequel, either on screen or on the page?

The very idea is anathema to many fans of the comic, who agree with critics that Moore's perfectly planned, circular storytelling was deliberately constructed so as to ensure that only the reader could decide what happens next. But if the movie makes enough money, a sequel could be unavoidable; Hollywood is a town that would let Jesus jump down off the cross and take his revenge on Pilate if it tested well with audiences. Comicscape points out that the idea of a sequel is nothing new: many such proposals have been floated over the years, including Rorschach's Journal and The Comedian's Vietnam War Diary (neither of which ever materialized). Plans are also in the works for a Watchmen video game set in the early 1970s, following the prevailing 'wisdom' that a prequel is the only non-disastrous way to expand the story. In the end, though, author Chad Derdowski echoes our own sentiments on the matter: any Watchmen sequel -- especially one without the participation of Alan Moore, which is virtually a guarantee -- will likely end up in the bargain bin next to old copies of Secret Wars II. "Classics are classics and will remain so,", he says, "no matter how hard a crappy sequel tries to ruin its legacy."

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Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

LOST HORIZON (1973)

It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.

SLACKER (1991)

Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005)

The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

Screengrab Review: "Watchmen"

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

No, unfortunately, your humble correspondent, despite his long history of being obsessed with the upcoming Zack Snyder adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic, was not one of those recently invited to view 26 minutes of the footage at a special preview screening. Nor was I numbered among those who got to see the entire film at a preview in Portland, to decidedly mixed reviews. Why I wasn't included despite my spooky fixation on the movie is unclear; it might have something to do with the fact that I've predicted the movie will suck raw pork knuckles since it was first announced. Whatever the case, I haven't seen the damn movie yet, and so that's not what I'm going to be reviewing today.

What I'm going to be reviewing today isn't even, technically, a movie. I'm not sure what it is. Its producers call it a "motion comic". It's not an animated film, exactly, nor is it a motion picture, nor is it a webcomic or anything else that we have the critical language to talk about. It's also not playing at a theater near you: it's available (the first three chapters, at least) exclusively as a download from the iTunes music store. Even though it isn't music, either. So what is it? It's basically the entire comic, written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, panel by panel, with a very basic, stripped-down sort of cutout animation. It's also narrated, but not dramatized -- that is, the dialogue is read aloud, in a sort of dramatic fashion, by character actor Tom Stechschulte. But he's the only member of the cast, which means it's not really a dramatic adaptation of the story -- or any kind of adaptation at all, really. It's almost like a book on tape of a comic book, only it movies. Kinda.

While it may be difficult to describe what Watchmen: The Motion Comic (no, really, that's what it's called) is, it's a lot easier to say whether it's any good: no. Since I have nothing to compare it against, lacking any other "motion comics" and not even sure what is supposed to be accomplished by them other than to serve as a promotional tool for the comic and the movie, I can't honestly say if it succeeds or fails on its own terms, because I don't know what those terms are. But I do know it's really boring. The only original element is a soundtrack that virtually defines the word "perfunctory", and while many people have pointed out how ridiculous it is to hear Stechschulte performing the female voices, equally ridiculous is hearing him perform any of the voices when there's no particular reason to do so. The animation, such as it is, can be clever, but it doesn't really add anything to the illustration -- it's too limited to do so. If you've always wanted to pay someone fifty dollars to get the same effect as reading a book to yourself out loud in the living room, this is the...uh...book? Movie? Comic? whatever...for you. Otherwise, the whole thing is pointless on a rather grand scale; take half the fifty and go buy a copy of the original Watchmen comic. You'll still have enough money to see the book, and enough to spare on a bottle of gin to forget this ludicrous endeavor was ever launched.

Still Watching the Watchmen...and the DVD Market, Too

Tony Stark (i.e., Robert Downey, Jr.) to Bruce Wayne: "I Got Your Dark Knight Right Here, Pal!"

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Robert Downey, Jr., America's scamp, has tasted what the other guys are selling and found it lacking. Downey, whose star vehicle Iron Man got the summer movie season of 2008 off to a bang back when it opened several hundred years ago, has given an interview to moviehole.com in which he found it impossible to discourse on what made his movie so special, and what will make its sequel (which reunites him with director Jon Favreau and Tropic Thunder co-writer Justin Theroux, who's working on the script) so special, without talking about what makes it different from The Dark Knight. Whereas Iron Man is "a very simple movie", Downey says of the Batman blockbuster, "It's like a Ferrari engine of storytelling and script writing and I'm like, 'That's not my idea of what I want to see in a movie.' I loved [Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan's] The Prestige but didn't understand The Dark Knight. Didn't get it, still can't tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I'm like, 'I get it. This is so high brow and so f--king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.' You know what? F-ck DC comics. That's all I have to say and that's where I'm really coming from."

The first thing to be said about this is that if anyone finds that their college education helps them to better understand why Jim Gordon didn't dispatch a SWAT team to surround that boat that the Joker was aboard after Eric Roberts tipped him off, then that lucky viewer must have gone to a hell of a school. (Personally, my college education wasn't even enough to keep me from pissing away eleven dollars on a ticket to Vicky Cristina Barcelona.) Of course, Downey's harsh words for DC Comics will set off little tremors in the minds of comics geeks who remember bitter wars of words on the playground between self-styled DC fanboys and Marvel zombies. However much he means it, it's fun when these companies' star employees pretend to be infected with the virus, as anyone who ever saw Alan Moore take custody of the microphone at a comics convention in the 1980s, before he adopted a "plague on both their houses" attitude. It's kind of like professional wrestling without the folding chairs. Downey himself seems to get a giggle out of his bad-boy act. "You know, you're never too old to burn your bridges because I believe I have offended everyone," he said. "I think I've got a couple more.

On the subject of his other summer hit, Tropic Thunder, Downey has one thing he wants to make very clear: he is not Kirk Lazarus, the looney, Oscar-festooned Method actor he plays, who vows to remain in character until he's recorded the picture's DVD commentary. Speaking of the character, Downey says that "I think his fatal flaw is pretty much any and everyone's who's in entertainment, which is, on a certain level: 'Oh if they believe they're a fraud and that's creating this neurotic state,' when the truth is, you are a fraud because you've gone too far into buying into your own hype and now you're, literally crazy. I think Kirk Lazarus is nuts." Discussing his decision to make Kirk Australian, Downey adds, "I just think that the Australian phenomenon reminds me more of American as with the British invasion from the '60s. But when I was thinking about Kirk Lazarus I was thinking about Colin Farrell, about Daniel Day Lewis and about Russell Crowe and whoever was the most effective tool for whatever my thing was, I would use." When it was pointed out to him that a lot of viewers sure do see a lot of Crowe in there, Downey permitted himself a smile. "Now do you think he would see it as the highest form of flattery or do you think that he would be less than pleased?"

"Watchmen": More Than Just Buying Dave Gibbons a New Boat

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Now that Dark Knight is finally going to be opening nationwide, we can finally return to the natural occupation of the comic book fan: deranged obsession over Zack Snyder's upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen.

As we've discussed before, one of the problems with the recent wave of successful motion picture adaptations of comic book properties is that while they've made tons of money for the producers of the movies, it hasn't worked the other way around. Comic book companies have slavered to get their properties on screen in recent years, in the hopes that audiences turned on by the big-screen adventures of Batman or the X-Men will follow those characters into their local comic book shop. This is especially important in these days of direct sales, when comic book sales are at a historical low, and people speak in non-hysterical terms about the demise of the industry. So it's worth noting that the millions in profit made my comic book movies hasn't generally been matched by a notable increase in comic book sales, one comic is bucking that trend: Watchmen.

One of the earliest comic book mini-series to take advantage of the 'graphic novel collection' format in the 1980s, Watchmen was already one of the most successful titles in DC's history, despite its indie sensibilities, adult storytelling, and complex, morally difficult story. But with the movie adaptation getting ever closer, its sales have shot way up -- and DC plans to capitalize on the interest in spades. They'll be promoting an aggressive three-pronged marketing attack to ensure that anyone sucked in by the movie to the degree that they absolutely must have the comic will be able to get one with not trouble. The triple attack includes a retailer discount for any shops that wish to carry the original softcover graphic novel; a new hardbound edition for collectors; and a deluxe edition featuring making-of material, rare artwork, and other bonus materials, the comic book equivalent of a fancy Criterion Collection disc.

Of course, to a hardcore Watchmen fan, this marketing push has an added benefit: unlike the film, with which he has disassociated himself, leaving all the profits to go to artist Dave Gibbons, writer Alan Moore still gets a share of the money from sales of the comic. So when the movie is released, those of you who still have a raggedy old copy of the softback might want to consider purchasing a movie tie-in edition...

More Goddamn Watchmen

Hellboy: The Letting Go

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

As more and more movies are made from comic books, the issues of creator's rights will increasingly pick at the film industry. With Marvel and DC products, it's generally not an issue -- not only are most of the creators long dead, but the characters themselves are corporate properties, held by two huge companies and not beholden to any single artist or writer. With independent comics, however, the issue grows much more complex. Some creators will be happy simply to sell the rights to their characters and stories for the kind of huge paycheck that only Hollywood can write; others will insist on being involved, to one degree or another, in the production of any film based on the characters they created. Frank Miller represents one extreme; displeased at the prospect of what liberties the movies would take with his characters, he decided to learn the film business himself so as to be able to exert maximum control over his properties in 300 and Sin City. (Although he didn't create the Spirit, he's taking a similarly proprietary approach in the creation of that movie.) Mike Mignola represents perhaps the oppisite end of the spectrum: always fiercely protective of the Hellboy character from the time it first appeared in Dark Horse Comics, he has learned when it's proper to let go of his creation in order to see it succeed on the big screen.

In an interview with Comics2Film regarding the new Hellboy 2: The Golden Army movie, which opens in wide release this weekend, Mignola discusses the differences between the comics and the film, the trust he came to develop with director Guillermo Del Toro when it came to creating the look of the movie, and how he had to learn when to let go of his own beliefs about what the movie should be and how it shouldn't be necessary for there to be major divergence between the two. "The first film was a loose adaptation, but it was coming off my work, and it was basically taking the Hellboy universe that I had created and translating it into del Toro's world. The second film, we chucked that idea after about eight hours because even in the first film, that character is already veering away from the world I created in the comic," says Mignola. "I know in the first film, he was making conscious decisions to try to suggest certain things that I do in the artwork...I'd love to think that he got some of that from studying my comic, but I think he's just a very careful craftsman."

(Of course, on the other other extreme, there's Alan Moore, who still refuses to take a dime from any movies based on his stories, on the theory that, since he had nothing to do with them, they're not his...)

Still Watching the Watchmen -- And The DVD Market, Too

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

In our ongoing quest to bring you every single solitary detail of the production of Zack Snyder's upcoming adaptation of The Watchmen until your head falls off, we are pleased to report an interesting development in the filming of the comic book masterpiece -- and one that has repercussions, as amazing as it may seem, to peope other than the hardcore geeks who are even at this moment salivating over the prospect of more Watchmen news.

One of the questions that has long nagged Watchmen fans (other than "will Snyder suddenly become much more talented when he begins work on this film?" and "are they kidding with that cast, or what?") is how the filmmakers can possibly cram the entire story of the comic into a two-hour movie. Alan Moore's Watchmen is one of the most complex comic series in history, full of dense symbolism, intricate reference, and tons of backstory -- much of it vital to the main plot -- told in supplemental materials that appeared in the back pages of the comic. No standard-length feature film could possibly capture all of that intricacy, and without it, many feared that the overall quality of the project would suffer.

Now, in an interesting piece in the New York Times, comes word that Snyder is not making one film, but two, simultaneously: The Watchmen itself, and Tales of the Black Freighter, an animated feature-length adaptation of the metafictional comic-within-a-comic read by a minor character in the Watchmen, which served to both illuminate and amplify some of the themes and symbols of the main story. Tales of the Black Freighter will not be included in the Watchmen movie -- but it will be released, on its own, as a separate DVD, only five days after the film is released in theatres.

As the Times article makes clear, this is the first step in a new strategy by Warner Brothers of producing value-added DVDs designed, in an era of cable television 'video on demand', to boost DVD sales when they're beginning to falter for the first time in their history. Warner has already had considerable success with this tactic in direct-to-video releases set in the DC Animated universe (such as Superman: Doomsday and Justice League: New Frontier), and the company claims this is about much more than just piling on extra junk for completists: it allows Snyder to tell a more complete story than the time limitations of the Watchmen movie will allow, and it allows the company to essentially profit three times off the the DVD market for the movie: first, with this supplemental release, which they anticipate selling in huge numbers on release; second, with the DVD release, months later, of the actual Watchmen movie; and third, with a deluxe package containing both, as well as other supplemental materials (including, it's rumored, a faux-documentary short film of Hollis Mason's Under the Hood -- another book-within-the-book featured in the Watchmen comic that likewise gave vital background information on the characters and their relationships).

Of course, the proof of this pudding will be in the eating, and if the movie sucks, no one's likely to care if there's more of it. But it's at least heartening to know that Warner Brothers has developed a strategy designed not only to be profitable, but to produce bonus materials that aren't just arbitrary junk designed to fill up disc space -- that are actually meant to enhance the quality of the original product.

Who Wants To Be The Account Executive For A Fictional Millionaire Superhero?

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:30:00 GMT

One of the niftiest features of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen comic was its fully realized fictional world: every aspect of the near-future alternate-reality America was fleshed out, from the names of the newspapers to the look of the pop fashion trends of the moment to the fast food joints and retail stores. Even the televisions were populated by cleverly thought-out commercials, many of them for products manufactured by Veidt Enterprises, the monolithic corporate giant run by ex-superhero Ozymandias.

Director Zack Snyder is determined to recreate this depth of field as much as possible, but he can't be bothered to actually make the commercials himself, since he is busy filming the movie and blogging endlessly about filming the movie. So he's making you do it! Or, more specifically, YouTube. Snyder is running a contest on the video-hosting site, inviting fans to create their own Veidt Enterprises commercials. If yours gets picked, you'll get thousands of dollars from the makers of this hugely expensive Hollywood blockbuster film!

Ha ha, no, just kidding. But you do have a chance to get your commercial featured in the movie -- for free! It's not exploitation if you enjoy it! Me, I'm picturing an ad for Veidt's "Nostalgia" cologne featuring an 80-year-old Wilford Brimley muttering, "You can smell like it's 1956 again."

As an aside, does anybody think that Zack Snyder looks absolutely terrible? I mean, I know he's under a lot of pressure, making a movie adaptation of a hugely well-respected property with geek cred aplenty, but the poor guy looks like he's aged a dozen and a half years since he wrapped 300.

We Watch the Watchmen...and Watch...and Watch....

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Boy, it seems like forever since we've had any Watchmen news, doesn't it? Well, don't worry, fellow slavering comic book fans: we fully intend to completely suck every tiny bit of magic out of the movie by relentlessly cramming every bit of Watchmen-related insider gossip down your gullets until, by the time the movie finally comes out sometime around the crack of doom, you will feel like you have already seen it eighteen times and be utterly sick of it. You're welcome.

Let's take the bad news first: it was announced this week that the movie will be scored by Tyler Bates, whose bombastic work has failed to impress us in everything from (surprise, surprise) 300 to exploitation fare aplenty like Half Past Dead and Alien Avengers II. Zack Snyder's latest blog post from the set brings us a look at some of the film's storyboards, allowing us to imagine what the comic might look like if it was drawn by our rather untalented fourteen-year-old cousin instead of by Dave Gibbons. And in news that should surprise no one but disappoint everyone, Alan Moore has made it official that he will continue his policy of having absolutely nothing to do with any motion picture made using his material as a source. "They must’ve learned something from the V for Vendetta debacle," he tells Wizard magazine. "I got a piece of paper a couple of months ago saying, 'I, the undersigned, hereby give you permission to take my name off of the film and to send my money to Dave Gibbons.' So I sent that back to them all signed and sealed, which means that now I don’t have to rant and spew about the film."

Still, there's a few reasons to be pleased: set designer Dawn Brown reports that while substantial liberties will be taken, at least a few of the costumes in the Watchmen film will be completely faithful to Gibbons' orginal design. And, in the best — and most shocking — Watchmen news of all, sales of the original graphic novel, widely considered the greatest superhero story ever written, have risen dramatically since the film adaptation was announced, so much so that it actually became the best-selling graphic novel of 2007. This is unexpectedly good news; the more people who read the original work, the better, and comic book movies often are predicted to cause a swell in sales of their source material, but up until now, it's generally never happened. And, by the way, it ensures that Alan Moore is going to make some money off of the Watchmen movie, whether he wants to or not. . .

More Goddamn Watchmen

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:30:00 GMT

Honestly, folks, we don't know why we're so obsessed with Watchmen news lately. We'll stop as soon as the movie comes out and is terrible, we promise. In the meantime, we're obviously not the only people who can't get enough of the hype, because when Jeffrey Dean Morgan was at a press junket promoting P.S. I Love You, all anyone wanted to talk to him about was his role as the Comedian in the upcoming comic adaptation. Morgan reports that the sets, which have only been seen in a few photos released by director Zack Snyder, are "so true to the book it's insane", discussed the challenge of playing a morally reprehensible character like the Comedian, and vows that the film is "going to change the way people look at movies". Meanwhile, artist Dave Gibbons, who drew the original Watchmen graphic novel (and who, because author Alan Moore maintains a policy of having nothing to do with film adaptations of his work, is the only creator involved in the movie), visited the set for the first time, describing the sensation of seeing the characters he helped bring into existence walking around and talking as "the most surreal experience of my life". Gibbons, who Morgan reports was tearing up at seeing the sets, keeps mum about the specifics of the film, as have most people working on the set, but claims that among the cast and crew there is a "palpable commitment to do this right". Only 15 months to go...

That's "Graphic Novel" to You, Fanboy

Peter Smith — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The productions of perhaps the two most anticipated comic book adaptations of all time — Watchmen and The Dark Knight — have both kicked into high gear, and there’s plenty of geeky content to go around before the movies actually end up in the can. (Try not to think too hard about the fact that Dark Knight draws only its title, and nothing else, from Frank Miller’s stunning Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, or that Watchmen is being directed by a guy who turned another, far lesser Frank Miller book into a homoerotic big-screen video game.) In the Guardian, film blogger Sean Dodson provides a handy rundown of the astonishingly large number of Dark Knight teaser websites that have sprung up in the last few weeks (including ones for the Gotham Police Department, the local newspaper and a creepily amusing recruitment site for the Joker’s henchmen). Meanwhile, Zack Snyder himself provides some photos from the back lot of Watchmen, which contain lots of goodies for longtime fans of the comic (lots of characters, locations, companies, and other cultural references to the book are present in the background of the shots), although the set designer doesn’t seem to realize that Grain Belt beer has never been a big seller in New York.
— Leonard Pierce