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.
Felicity Huffman talking about Piven sushigate on Letterman last night.
Perhaps the funniest Black List script from last year is Kyle Killen‘s The Beaver, about a chronic depressive whose life is taken over by his beaver hand puppet. It’s said by two sources to be in Steve Carell‘s corner. That is, if the term “attached to” means anything. “But he’s also attached to a great many things,” one guy cautions. “I’ve heard they’re readying the next Get Smart for his next hiatus. Carell also has a teaming with Tina Fey in the works, but it’s pricey. He wants to spend time with family, so I’ve heard they’re planning to shoot whatever his next feature is in Massachusetts to accommodate that.”
The next Get Smart?
David Mickey Evans‘ Ace Ventura Jr. Pet Detective hit the video shelves yesterday. I see in the jowly face of that kid, Josh Flitter, the essence of the American cancer that the Taliban is dead set against. And you know what? They’re right. (Thanks to Jack Morrissey for the tip-off.)
As of one hour ago (i.e., 9 am Pacific) 90% of the advance-purchase Fandango action was being slurped up by Watchmen….surprise! 3% of the early-buy money was going to the Jonas Brothers 3-D Concert Movie, 1% was being hammered by Slumdog Millionaire, and so on down the line. We’ll be looking at a cultural avalanche this weekend. See how much effect all those neg-head reviews and pissed-off fanboy postings have had, Warner Bros. publicity?
