I agree with the other guys. This could be a problem. It’s the growling and the grimacing, for the most part. I don’t need Wolverine-Jackman to scream and flex and make his blood vessels pop. I just need him to be cool and sardonic and do the thing like it’s no sweat at all. I want him to be a smart-ass. Instead, this trailer has convinced me that the film — whatever it actually will be — is totally generic, and will surprise me not.
Many moons ago (i.e., last summer) a story broke about James Franco‘s deal to play Allen Ginsberg in a Gus Van Sant-produced biopic called Howl. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were announced as the co-directors and co-writers of the drama, which will mainly be about the obscenity trial that followed the 1957 publication of “Howl,” Ginsberg’s legendary poem. The film will begin shooting just a few days from now.
James Franco (l.), the youthful Allen Ginsberg (r.)
I happened to reconsider the Howl project after reading Roger Friedman‘s story today about Franco having sold a collection of short stories to the Simon & Schuster guys.
Not be a stickler, but if you’re being cast to play a famous person aren’t you expected to sort of resemble him or her? At least somewhat? And shouldn’t it bother someone besides myself that Franco doesn’t look anything like Ginsberg did in the mid ’50s? As in no fucking resemblance whatsoever?
The only way Franco could look more unlike the young Ginsberg would be if he was Asian-American, African-American, a native of Tonga or an Aborigine. As is, Franco could probably make it into the finals of the annual “I don’t look the least fucking bit like Allen Ginsberg” competition that has reportedly been staged each and every year in Oslo, Sweden, since the early ’60s.
Which famous ’50s guy does Franco resemble? Well, if you dyed his hair black he might pass for Farley Granger. He could star in a biopic about Heath Ledger, I suppose.
Vanity Fair.com’s Frank DiGiacomo and illustrator Frank Harris have imagined a “new breed of Washington, D.C.-based superheroes, battling one another for dominance even as they wage a desperate war against their common enemies: Mortgage Mash, Mr. Credit Freeze, and the un-tame-able Afghakistan. Will they save the world, or kill each other trying?”
Washmen lineup (l. to r.): Megalomandias, Bad News Joe, ‘Night Dow, Dr. Chicago, Phantom Pantsuit, The Buccaneer, Rushhack and The Jokerer.
Oh, and by the way: I’m not the only guy who thinks N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith went a litle bit overboard in his Watchmen review (i.e., by comparing Zack Snyder‘s fanboy flick to Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001.)
In a comment about the previous item, HE Reader “Cahuenga Kid” supposed that the driver in question “must have been going really fast to lose control.” Well, not according to this analysis, which was thrown together with some fairly primitive software back in ’90 or thereabouts.
Cholame crash from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo
I came across this California landscape photo this morning, which was taken almost exactly eleven years ago, in either February or March. Without giving away any hints, something happened here in a movie-related sense. And you have to tell me what.
Yesterday evening an HE reader accused me of “wanting to hate Watchmen all along.” No, I haven’t been wanting to hate it all along, I replied. I have hated it all along. But what exactly do I mean when I say “it”?
Not the Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons-John Higgins graphic novel, which is actually a fairly deep, teeming-with-inner-realms thing with offbeat flavors and weirdnesses — a story about alienation and aloneness and being adamant of mind, and well told with rich noir flavoring and a nice use of time-shuffling imagination. “It” means the vast multitudes of superhero movie fans going into this thing…anticipating this thing, I should say…and practically levitating off the ground about it with eager-beaver fanboy erections.
Yes, I read Watchmen wanting to hate it because of my deep loathing of the superhero conceit — the idea of the much-bolder-of-spirit and more powerful “other” who lives within and is unleashed under another identity or in another psychological realm, in the guise of a masked and musclebound gay-nippled spandex-wearing vigilante-outsider crimefighter. The Watchmen novel lifts itself out of this, yes, because of the imaginative ways it gets around or builds upon and/or goes the other way regarding the superhero bullshit, but I have a very strong aversion to the wimpy overweight dweeby-loser belief system that fortifies (in a commercial-consumer sense) the superhero mythology.
Real men don’t need outfits or superpowers. Nor, more importantly, do they have time for that shit. If I needed the fortification and was feeling badly about myself (which I’m not), I could make myself feel pretty damn good every day by saying, “Hey, man, at least you don’t nurse pathetic fantasies about your secret hidden self that’s much cooler than the one that gets around every day and rides subways and groans as he buys stuff in Whole Foods and tries to take care of things in the real world…at least you’re not living in that sad little realm.”
But that said, I do respect the Watchmen graphic novel as much as I’m able to respect it, which is…you know, fairly genuinely, as far as it goes. For being a seminal deconstructivist superhero deal as it were.
After reading the above a guy named Chicago Dad asked “how is a review coming from a perspective that is clearly invested in hatred of the culture that produced the work any less skewed and more reliable than one that comes from a perspective that loves that culture? Both will probably fail to separate the film experience from their feelings about the larger culture that spawned it.”
My point is that a positively-invested fanboy saying he loves Watchmen means nothing. But if a hater like myself says he loves, likes, or admires Watchmen (or even if he acknowledges there are elements in the film he can roll with), then that, ladies and gentlemen…that means something, I think. I’m not saying you can take a Hollywood Elsewhere rave of Watchmen to the bank because the bank is already well-stocked at Fandango, but a thumbs-up from a hater is always a significant thing.
Why would anyone alive and alert in the city of New York who hasn’t yet seen The Hurt Locker not want to attend tomorrow night’s (i.e., Thursday, 3.5) 7 pm showing at Lincoln Center? What could possibly constitute stiff competition, outside of theatre tickets or a secret meeting at a hotel with someone married?
The Hurt Locker is “less a combat picture than a thriller about the risks and intoxications of professional passion,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote the other day. “The main character, brilliantly played by Jeremy Renner, is consumed by his work, at once meticulous in his techniques and reckless in the way he deploys them. In this respect he resembles [director Kathryn] Bigelow, who turns the discipline of action filmmaking into a kind of visceral visual poetry.”
I’ll admit that the $20 per ticket cost might deter me if I was on the fence for this or that reason. $20 per viewing is a little rich for me. For anyone. For any movie. I wonder what’s so damn special about the Film Society of Lincoln Center that they get to charge this amount?
Here’s to the just-passed Horton Foote, whom I’ll always admire and feel really close to because of his screenplay of Tender Mercies, perhaps my all-time favorite rural relationship film played on a subdued and generally calmed-down key. (Whadja think about that one, Watchmen fans? Was it visually fierce enough for ya? The only problem was that Duvall’s Mac Sledge never put a superhero costume on.) His To Kill A Mockingbird screenplay was perhaps the first adult-level thing to get to me as a kid.
“Look at Watchmen from the back to the front,” David Poland finally wrote today at 5 pm Pacific, after seeing Zack Snyder‘s forthcoming weekend winner last night. “Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?
“Not ‘did you think the glass thing on Mars was really cool?’ Or ‘is the prison sequence easily the best thing that Zack Snyder has ever done?’ Or ‘did you like seeing Malin’s ta-tas? Or ‘Is ‘Archie’ cool as hell?’ Or ‘how cool is it watching people explode and then seeing the guts drip off the furniture?’
“And I am not even picking on the terrible wigs, the uninspired fight choreography in all but a couple of sequences, the slow-mo/speed-up thing that is years past being a cliche, the hideously cliched music choices, and other just softball stuff in the film that should have been done better.
“I am looking at the core. Do you care? Do you have an emotional stake in the characters or the world they are trying to save?
“No. And no. For me.
“And yet I don’t hate the film or anything. I just wish it was about something more than recreating the book faithfully on screen. Because you know what? You’re better off reading the book if you want to have that experience. Then you will get all the sidebars and you will have time to consider them. And you will fill in the blanks [even] though, amazingly enough, Snyder, in all his serious effort to be faithful, does what the book does not, which is to fill in those blanks. Perhaps it is not intentional. But again, it is the nature of film. It simplifies, even if you don’t want it to.
“I wish I could say ‘go for the spectacle’ but frankly, you are better off watching The Dark Knight again in Blu-ray. Much better off.”
N.Y. Post critic Kyle Smith filed a Watchmen rave last night. Sounds like too much of a rave to me. (“Thrillingly sophisticated”?) But I was expecting Smith to be favorably disposed because he’s a comic-book generation guy, or close enough to it.
I said it a couple of weeks ago but it bears repeating: Take with a grain of salt the views of any Watchmen reviewer who grew up reading superhero comics, which is pretty much anyone under 40, give or take. They have their life savings invested in this bank, so to speak, so I know what I’m talking about when I say they can’t be trusted. In fact, trust no one on this thing. Don’t even trust Barack Obama if he winds up seeing it (which he probably will sooner rather than later).
Except for guys like myself, I mean. Only the stand-up boys who have zero investment in comic book lore can be trusted to tell it straight. We are the blazing truth-tellers — the ones who watch the Watchmen geeks.
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