Cinemonkey

Comic Book News: Crumb has finished his version of Genesis

Well, maybe not quite finished, though he has also wrapped up the cover, an introduction, and a map that appears at the front of the book. But still, according to the Crumb newsletter, the cartoonist has for all intents and purposes finished the 201-page book, which is to be published by W. W. Norton in autumn. The newsletter goes on to say that Crumb's' current plans are to catch up with his correspondence (I hope that includes me), take a trip the States (I hope he comes to visit me), and then perhaps collaborate with his wife on a book (their collaborations for the New Yorker have been quite successful ... but I hope they don't write about me!). 

Movie Review: Watchmen

Just as no single movie adaptation can fully realize the intricacies of Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel  Watchmen, no one review can encompass all the tangents and controversies attendant on this bellwether project.

Watchmen was originally published by DC Comics in 12 issues from 1986 to 1987. It envisioned an alternative dystopian Earth in which superheroes actually existed. Moore speculates how they might have affected the course of history (America wins the Vietnam war and Nixon serves multiple terms).

Eventually, the public and the police rebel, and superheroes are banned by an act of Congress. Taking place over the course of several days, the plot line concerns the investigation of one adamantly unretired masked avenger, Rorschach, who is looking into the death of a government employee who turns out to be a former superhero nicknamed the Comedian. Rorschach contacts other members of his former team, including Dr. Manhattan (the only character with true super powers), the brainy industrialist Ozymandias, and the former Night Owl, a flabby trust fund baby also now in retirement. Rorschach believes that someone is “killing masks” and his suspicions prove to be true, but the nature of the conspiracy also proves to be complex and unpredictable.

After years of failed attempts to adapt the book to screen by a vast Watchmen-like array of diverse directors, the studios finally summoned Zack Snyder, whose then-recent 300 appeared to indicate that he was adept at bringing comic book visions to the screen with some accuracy. Years in the making, the Watchmen that has now reached the screen is probably as accurate a recreation as the filmmakers could manage. Nevertheless,Watchmen, the movie, raises interesting questions about the efficacy of comic book adaptations in the first place, along with continuing issues such as big screen violence, corporate perfidy as a subject, and, well, who watches Watchmen?

Reviews, and reviews of reviewers, have noted that fans of the source book won’t or can’t be satisfied with the film due to some poor acting and significant deviations from the novel’s last act. Reviewers have also wondered aloud if viewers who are not fans of the book will get anything out of a movie that in the experience — just like the book, frankly — is a talky affair with little in the way of Dark Knight-style car chases and fight scenes.

Watchmen, the book, was both funny and moving — an intricate text on the order of Ulysses that defied adaptation. You’d think that all the filmmakers had to do was to follow the comic as if it were a storyboard (which is what Watchmen: The Motion Comic does: see the DVD review).

But it turns out that making movies from comics isn’t that easy, at least when the source is as epical as Moore’s book. One, people read comics differently from the way movies ultimately move (for a disastrous example of how a director didn’t understand this, see Ang Lee’s embarrassing Hulk). And second, and surprisingly, comics can be much more subtle: in Watchmen, Snyder exaggerates the violence of some scenes, a prison break sequence for example, way beyond what the comic shows and suggests, probably because there wasn’t much in the way of action to work with in the first place and he had to seize what opportunities he could.

Fans may not like Watchmen for “betraying” the book, and the public may find it disappointingly thoughtful and inert, but the film does reward multiple viewings. For both the fans and the non-fans, a first viewing gets you past the weight of the book hanging over the project and past the basic plot itself. Subsequent viewings show the range of tones, the humor, and the (mostly) perfect casting sensibility that Snyder brought to this complex subject. Watching Watchmen could easily become a full time job.

[This review originally appeared in the March 25, 2009 issue of the Vancouver Voice.]

DVD Review: Watching More Watchmen, Two Watchmen Supplements

Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen is a comic book (or “graphic novel”) so encyclopedic and so complex that no one film adaptation could contain it. Watchmen movie director Zack Snyder, and the movie’s releasing studio, both knew this, or at least saw another opportunity for vertical integration and subsidiary enterprise, and have released an animated version of the comic book on the one hand, and elements from the book that didn’t make it into the final movie on the other.

Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic is an animated version of the book’s 12 chapters. Those who complain about the liberties taken with the book on its way to the screen can turn comfortably to this initially odd-seeming adaptation. Hewing strictly to the theme and order of the original panels of the comic, and with only light editing of the dialogue, this work goes from frame to frame, with word balloons popping up and carefully selected portions of each panel animated to suggest movement. As on an audio book, one person, (Tom Stechschulte, an actor who has appeared in What About Bob and The Manchurian Candidate and who has played a judge on Law and Order) reads the text. This requires him to mimic both Silk Spectre and her mother, and the African-American psychiatrist who treats Rorschach in prison. He does so surprisingly successfully, and by the end of just the first of the 12 chapters, the viewer has no problem with the stripped-down nature of the presentation: like the black-garbed puppeteers of a Japanese play, the machinery vanishes behind the gripping allure of the material.

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter was apparently cut from the movie (the fans, if they don’t already know, will get the full details sooner or later). In its original Watchmen context, Tales of the Black Freighter is a popular E. C. Horror Library-style comic book that, in Moore’s alternate universe, takes the place of super hero comics, since there were now real ones in that world. In Moore’s book, the pirate comic is read by a kid who hangs out near a newsstand, the location of which is crucial to understanding Watchmen’s dramatic last chapter. On this DVD, Tales is a realistically animated horror story about a man (voiced by 300’s Gerald Butler) stranded on an island by pirates who raided his ship, and who uses the corpses of his shipmates to form the underpinnings of a raft, which he then uses to get back home — before, he hopes, the pirates reach the port and threaten the life of his beloved. In the book, the castaway is a miniature Ozymandias, a man with a plan; isolated on the disc in a cartoon, he is the central figure in a horrific revenge story. As with the film itself, the story appears misleadingly cinematic while being inherently most successful only as a comic.

Also on this disc is Under the Hood, a mockumentary that summarizes the backstory of the super hero groups that figure in the overall narrative. It’s presented as a 60 Minutes-style segment profiling a retired masked avenger (Stephen McHattie) who has written a memoir and exposé of costumed heroes. Viewers who think that Carla Gugino got short shrift in the movie will get their fill of her here, shown both in full Silk Spectre 1 regalia and as an aging interview subject.

The material on the disc is fun if you are a Watchmen obsessive, and illuminating if you haven’t read the book. The two-disc Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic hit the streets Tuesday, March 3, from Warner Home Video for $29.95, and Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter and Under the Hood is available on Tuesday, March 24, and retails for $27.95, or both are available via Netflix or at a video store near you.

[This review originally appeared in the March 25, 2009 issue of the Vancouver Voice.]

Movie Nostalgia: The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

I was going to do some real work yesterday but got sidetracked by the This channel again. In the morning the channel broadcast an old Barbara Stanwick-Sterling Hayden-Raymond Burr noir I'd never heard of called Crime of Passion (directed by Gerd Oswald and released in 1957). That was followed by a terribly truncated showing of Richard Lesters's brilliant Juggernaut. While that was on in the background, I noticed that the next film to be aired was The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. I settled in to watch a great double feature of '70s cinema, but when Pelham began, it turned out to be a TV movie version originally broadcast in 1998, previously unknown to me. 

The original Pelham, released in 1974 and directed by Joseph Sargent from a novel by John Godey and a script by Peter Stone (Charade), is one of those great New York City paranoia films. Released around the same time as Death Wish and other films that portrayed NY as a city out of control, it has a tremendous cast, including Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, and a terrific score by David Shire that creates a jangly symphony of a city. 

The TV Pelham is directed by Felix Enríquez Alcala, who has done a lot of Fox shows as well as episodes of BSG and the Steven Seagal film Fire Down Below. Alcala also photographed Pelham (which was made in Toronto), and it has a fine crisp look, sometimes contrasty and two-toned down to practically black and white. It's a necessarily stripped down version of Sargent's movie, for example there is no mayor here, just an assistant who shows up at the command center, and with a lot of the NY flavor from the original present only in vestigial form. Edward James Olmos (who has worked with Alcala a lot) is in the  Matthau role and Vincent D'Onofrio is in the Shaw role. It is no intended insult to say that D'Onofrio, much less many actors, can match the force that Shaw brought to the role, but it must be noted that D'Onofrio, whom I otherwise admire in his Law and Order series, is here at his most Brando-ey mannered. 

The most significant indice of the difference in the film's quality and achievement is to compare the "counting the money" scene, which is substantially there in the TV movie but without the verve and detail of Sargent's and without the Shire score. Also indicative is the "they don't know if the money's arrived" realization and the "dead man's hand" realization, which occurs on a city street as Olmos talks it out in a cursory manner with the Jerry Stiller equivalent, Lorraine Bracco. These diminutions don't bespeak laziness, necessarily, but under-budgeted exposition. Nevertheless, Alcala's Pelham looks and feels like no other TV movie I've seen, and at the time of its airing must have been impressive to some viewers tired of the "talking head" form of TV movie.  

All of this is of some currency because Tony Scott is coming out with a third adaptation on June 12, 2009, with Denzel Washington in the Matthau role and John Travolta in the Shaw part, with Brian Helgeland apparently writing it from scratch from the source novel. The original film is still a masterpiece, but I like Tony Scott and look forward to his version. 

Movie Nostalgia: Pulp Fiction's 15th Anniversary

A friend just pointed out that today is the 15th anniversary of Pulp Fiction. I have in my Tarantino and Tarantino related stash a 15th anniversary edition of Reservoir Dogs, which was published in 2006 and sold in a tin oil can facsimile (it's the third DVD of the film I've accumulated), but I am unaware of a similar disc for Pulp Fiction. Tarantino is himself off in Germany filming a WWII "mission" film, and anyway, the company that did RD was one of those firms that tried to sell you the same movie over again every few years. 

I distinctly remember the first reference to Tarantino I'd seen. The reference came in passing in a summary of promising Sundance movies in a column by J. Hoberman in Premiere magazine. His wording just made me want to see that movie, which I did many, many months later at an advance screening in the KOIN Center Cinemas. The film was great (though at the time I did have reservations about its '70s drive-in movie "look"). Two years later came Pulp Fiction. That film was sneaked at the Lloyd Cinemas with Harvey Weinstein and Tarantino on the premises, the director introducing the film in a dramatic fashion recounted in one of the many books about him. I wasn't at that screening, unfortunately. I've never seen Tarantino in person. 

In my review of Pulp Fiction for the once-alternative newspaper Willamette Week (not available on line), I noted that characters in Tarantino's films frequently make the mistake of going to the bathroom at the cosmically wrong time: when they come out, disaster ensues. I think I was the first person to point out this theme, but maybe not. That was shortly before the birth of the WWW, which would soon flood the media with opinions and insights into Tarantino's work, a resource that led directly to my book, Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook (you can buy it off the column to the right).  That was my second book on Tarantino, and I am currently working on a third (sorry about the advertisements for myself, but if I don't do it ...). 

My interest in Tarantino hasn't been steady. I went though a phase of hate and impatience, probably like a lot of fans, and wrote about my qualms in the late, lamented PDXS. But the hate turned back to love, and that resulted in the two books, and to his credit, Tarantino and his films survived that immersion in his oeuvre without diminution of affection. I remember settling down to re-watch Reservoir Dogs with my friend Damon Houx and a few others while researching the first book, and how our annotative chatter soon turned to silence as we became entranced once again by the film that all of us had seen many times already. 

The bathroom theme of Pulp Fiction is of course now well known, having been pointed out by many others. The theme probably gets to the root of Tarantino's metaphysics (always pay attention, never relax, because you never know what surprising thing is coming at you), and his practical sense of pulp fiction/drive-in movie story structure (when in doubt, have a guy come into the room with a gun, to quote the Bloody Bard).  There are bathroom moments in all his films, even in Inglourious Basterds, if the script is an accurate account of what will be the finished film. Since Psycho, the bathroom has ceased to be solely a safe haven, a refuge or site of reflection. And one of the saddest facets attached to of one of John Travolta's emerging-from-the-bathroom moments is that he will never get to finish the Modesty Blaise novel he was reading. 

DVD Review: A Michael Powell Double Feature

As the years go by and new, terrible films keep coming out, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have become increasingly important, resources of still living ideas and refuge from the tyranny of modern mediocrity. Thus it is a delight to announce that two of Powells' most difficult-to-see films have finally made their way onto DVD.

The Michael Powell Double Feature gathers together Powell's last financially successful film in his lifetime, A Matter of Life and Death (1946), called Stairway to Heaven in America, and done with his longtime partner Pressburger, and Powell's last film, Age of Consent (1969) based on an Australian novel by the multifaceted Norman Lindsay (who was also the subject of the mid-'90s movie Sirens) and shot down under.

A Matter of Life and Death has heretofore been available here only on an inferior videotape. Now it comes in glorious, pristine Eastmancolor (with black and white passages) and a fine mono soundtrack. It tells of a flier (David Niven) a few days before the end of WWII who bails out of his disabled plane without a parachute. He survives, but the operators of a crowded heaven want him anyway. On earth he has fallen in love with American servicewoman Kim Hunter; in heaven he is defended before a tribunal by Powell regular Roger Livesey. It's an expressionistic tale, possibly going on solely in the mind of Niven, and unusually emotional for Powell. It blends poetry, philosophy, romance, drama, action, and comedy in an intricate blend whose imagery and ideas resonate back and forth throughout its running time.

Another Powell masterpiece, but far less recognized, Age of Consent is a variation on The Horse's Mouth, in this case a tale of an Australian painter (co-producer James Mason) who escapes from New York and back to Brisbane, as a stopover on his way to a remote island, inhabited luckily almost solely by Helen Mirren, in her first movie. The loping narrative simply recounts how the Gauguinesque painter, Bradley Morahan, acclimates himself to the island and takes on the near-feral Mirrin as a model. A Lawrencian figure, with a touch of Prospero, Morahan is on a back-to-nature, simplicity quest, which he doesn't necessarily find, but the remote island he finds himself on offers something much different.

The film is so crisply shot (by Hannes Staudinger) that you can almost feel the sand between Mason's toes as he walks along the sunset beach, or feel the sunlight against Mirren's frequently naked skin. Powell loved nature, and as what we call a "location masochist," like John Huston and Werner Herzog, preferred settings that were as difficult to reach as possible. Here he turns the screen into a bright pallet that matches the imagination of Mason's painter. Also delightful in the film is a terrier named Godfrey. Age of Consent has been restored for this disc, its original credit sequence and musical score put back in decades after Columbia took them out to make this art film more "commercial."

There is a discrete amount of supplements to support the two films. Both films feature a five or six minute video introduction by Martin Scorsese. A Matter of Life and Death also has an informative audio commentary track by Powell-scholar Ian Christie, whose books on Powell are well worth reading. Age of Consent has more in the way of extras. There is a sleepy-eyed yak track by Film Comment writer Kent Jones, who gives an account of the film's making from a younger generation's perspective, plus a making of, an interview with Mirren, and a small featurette featuring filmmakers Ron and Valerie Taylor, who did the underwater footage for the film (as well as for, more famously, Jaws).

The Michael Powell Double Feature comes from Sony on two discs and retails for $24.96, hitting the street on Tuesday, January 6, or available from NetFlix or a video store near you.

TV: A New All-Movie Network

I wanted to bring readers' attention to a new broadcast channel I've stumbled upon. It's called This, or ThisTV, and I have no idea where the channel calls home or who is involved in creating it. I do notice that the promoters love puns on the word "this." A typical self-promotional spot will include, "This is very cool," and other puns, so that at times you feel trapped in an Abbott and Costello routine. But the programers make interesting choices within their limited means.

I came upon the channel two or three weeks ago on a weekend when I converted my iMac into a television via EyeTV, which to my surprise receives the new digital feed. In any case, in my town, Portland, Oregon, the digital end of the spectrum sends out two local NBC affiliates (though one is a weather channel), four PBS feeds (though one is the local radio station's audio over a slide show of seven numbingly rotated Oregon landscape pix), and about eight religious channels. ThisTV, the channel, is broadcast as the secondary feed of the ABC affiliate, and it must have gone on air the same day I activated my new set up. It seems new.

A possible website was not live the last time I looked so there's no info there, but I did find "this" programing guide. What I did glean from dropping in on the station over a few weeks was that the station appears to own a huge package of MGM-Orion-UA movies and TV shows. Within these limitations, the programers do some interesting things. For example, Cotton Comes to Harlem was followed by Across 110th Street, as if Quentin Tarantino were in the booth. The Poitier drama Pressure Point was followed by the racially-themed noir Odds Against Tomorrow. Alice's Restaurant was followed by Hair. One Saturday This offered three beach party movies in a row (well, the third was a ski party movie, but it did have Frankie Avalon in it, with a cameo by James Brown trying to dance in a space the size of a bungalow's foyer). Another Saturday was a westerns day, so the schedule included Support Your Local Sherif, Hawks's Red River, Man with the Gun (with Robert Mitchum, music by Alex North), Sam Whiskey, and The Scalphunters. The next day was war movies day. This has also shown two Ossie Davis movies in a row and two William Schallert films on the same day, no doubt unintentional mini-festivals.

Late one night, when I woke up with a touch of insomnia, the channel was airing the old The Outer Limits (which is why I think the channel is brand new ... the first episode that aired was the first in the series), Mr. Ed, and The Patti Duke Show, followed by early morning broadcasts of some shrill old '70s or '80s cartoon shows like the Paddington Bears.

This all may sound good but a problem with the station is that there are lots and lots and lots of commercial breaks with a limited, repetition-injury-enducing number of ads and PSAs. Worse, the movies are truncated, panned and scanned, and censored. And they show the same movies over and over again. I also have a feeling that though some of the movies aired are good, the programmers think they are all bad, as if they are dealing with a pile of junk only the unemployed and meth addicts would watch. Partially, the programers are right about their product. I've sat through some truly bad films on This: a third rate gumball rally film called Safari 3000 with David Caradine, Stockard Channing, and Christopher Lee; a bad Australian "thriller" with Sam Elliott as a private eye; a blonde-dyed Michael Madsen at his mannered worst in an incoherent drive-in type movie called Dead Connection; and a somnambulistic Burt Reynolds in Malone (there are a lot of Burt Reynolds movies on This).

Those of us without cable or satellite are the lowest of the low as far as broadcasters are concerned. Our movies are bleeped and laden with advertising. And what advertising! This, like the local Fox affiliate during the day, offers up endless ads for gouging technical schools, storage devices, and health treatments, commercials that are all loud and frequent. This is not the ideal way to view old movies, especially if there is a video store just down the street. However, if you only have television from the air and don't mind having truncated movies selected for you in sometimes interesting combinations, This is adequate as a free version of AMC.

[This text originally appeared in a slightly different form as a posting on the Mobius Home Video Forum. Kenneth Warner wrote in to say that, "MGM co-owns ThisTV, actually, with Weigel (which owns a number of indy stations in the Midwest)."]

Book Review: Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star

It's fascinating how much faces change over time. For those interested in the evolution of the human face as basically a fashion statement, there is no better way to track such changes and evaluate the manipulation of faces than through movie stars. And probably the best movie star to use as a sample is Joan Crawford.

The face of Joan Crawford is, over the years, an object study in facial evolution in the 20th century as Joan goes from a soft big eyed ingenue (no one had eyes as hite as hers) to a the shark-faced dame of films like Trog, her last movie, in 1970 (I've never seen it, but am told that it is not as bad as the title would make you think). Only Marlene Dietrich, a similarly image-obsessed star, comes close in matching the transition from the '30s to the '50s, or from soft baby fat to sharp lines, using lighting from above to bring out the angularity of the face and the dictatorial display of the cheekbones.

If you are as fascinated by Crawford's face as I am, then there is no better current photo album for contemplation than Joan Crawford: The Enduring Star (Rizzoli, 240 pages, $60, ISBN 978 0 8478 3066 4) with text by film critic Peter Cowie, and additional material by Mick LaSalle (the San Franciso based reviewer who has a speciality in pre-code Hollywood) and director George Cukor (a transcript of the eulogy he delivered at Crawford's funeral in 1977). The changes in Crawford's face over five decades of pubic display are a product of the inevitable alterations brought by time; a product of the changes in makeup and fashion and how they are photographed of evolutions in photography itself, including lighting and film; and possibly a product of then-primitive medical enhancements.

But few stars were as willful as Crawford in making herself a star, understanding and catering to her fans (her fans even re-named the former Lucille Le Sueur as Joan Crawford in a studio-sponsored magazine contest), and buying into the studio system -- yet at the same time eventually accruing enough power to risk different kinds of projects, such as Possessed (1947), in which she plays a jealous crazy person. In the opening sequence of this film she even daringly appears without makeup, which for Crawford was like a confession, like a catcher playing without padding, or a dominatrix without her leather armor (Cowie likens Crawford to a domina in his last chapter). 

If Crawford the star is an artificial construct, her very artificiality is the keynote to an outline of American visages from the 20s to the '70s, when Crawford devolved into a fashion and facial dinosaur. But the artificiality of a star is the very point of stardom, as well as its eventual trap. Her artificiality is on a continuum with Playboy foldouts, fantasy apparitions that become impossible lifestyle goals. All exterior and all disillusioning ambition, Joan Crawford was probably someone whom her fans ultimately didn't really want to know. Crawford the legend, the studio construct, and maybe even the human being has by now probably overcome the "Mommie Dearest" taint.

Cowie, in his long essay, is very good at tracking the bipartite nature of Crawford's career -- from flapper hoofer in pre-Production Code movies in the 1920s to Hollywood grande dame in the 1950s (there's a bit of Tracy Lords or Madonna in Crawford's having roots in sexy tales before being anointed with prestige pictures and Oscars). He notes how hard Crawford worked at elevating herself, learning how to stage dinner parties and dress with sophistication. Yet at the same time, Crawford, who might be viewed as at least a co-auteur of her films, continually drew upon her impoverished roots in Texas as plot fodder, as in films such as Mildred Pierce. Like Tom Cruise, she couldn't help being "confessional" in her choice of subject matter (remember Cruise's "mask" phase?), possibly because that's what she knew best. Essentially, Cowie follows her career and tells stories about her doings, offers light production histories of various movies, which are helpful when they are now-forgotten vehicles from the '30s, and charts Joan's progress up the prestige ladder.

Only in chapter two does he begin to address Crawford as a fashion horse and the reader has a slight feeling that Mr. Cowie is not quite as into it (some of designer Adrian's creations for her are deemed "frothy" [page 92]) . Certain other writers, such as Anne Hollander or Valerie Steele, might have been more expansive or allusive on the subject. Later on, his account of Crawford's appearance in Nicholas Ray's sexually ambiguous western Johnny Guitar lacks a certain depth and emotional resonance or cultural linkages.

But though Cowie's text doesn't attain the heights of, say, Andrew Britton on Hepburn or Cary Grant (or for that matter Kael on Grant) or Molly Haskell on Marlon Brando -- to cite a few notable examples among many -- his text does offer a frank account of Crawford's life and career that interacts with the wealth of accompanying photographs. 

Readers of the book thereafter inspired to see the star in action could do little better than to pick up or rent the first volume of The Joan Crawford Collection, originally released on June 14th, 2005. The Warner Bros. set contain five key films (well, at least four of them are key) including The Women, Possessed, Midred Pierce, Humoresque, and the relatively minor The Damned Don't Cry, though it is the first of her collaborations with director Vincent Sherman, with whom she had one of her numerous affairs (Sherman's oral history tapes are converted into an audio commentary track). Each disc is laden with supplements, especially The Women, which has alternative footage of certain scenes, and Mildred Pierce which has a small video on the film as a perfect noir along with one of the set's two audio commentary tracks. Each of the films receives bright and sharp transfers.

Crawford has yet to be fully represented on DVD by her pre-Code years -- which are so important, as Cowie points out, as the building blocks of her later career -- but at least Fox home video's film noir series does include the mysterious Otto Preminger film (and not really a noir) Daisy Kenyon, which features one of Crawford's best and most ambiguous performances.