As if anyone doesn’t already know, Watchmen is an award-winning, twelve-issue comic book created by the writer/magician Alan Moore and the artist Dave Gibbons, originally published by DC Comics in that dark and distant year of your lord, 1986. Steeped in Reagan-era pessimism and dreams of nuclear holocaust, the book did more for superhero storytelling than all Frank Miller’s work combined. It dragged the genre, kicking and screaming, into the late twentieth century, disguising its social relevance with a baroque self-reflexiveness now recognized as the hallmark of comic’s Iron Age.
It is also, now, with the release of the extra-super-duper-special Ultimate Edition, a three and a half hour, suburban sprawl of a film, directed by MTV alum Zack Snyder. Reviewers love to crow about Watchmen‘s pivotal nature, seeing its reconstruction into a can’t-help-but-call-it-“epic” film as a watershed moment for superherodom. These contentions are as accurate as they are illiterate, removing the story from its proper place and time. An intelligent critique of this film has not and (I’ll obviously argue) cannot be written without a true understanding of the context that birthed Watchmen in the first place. {More}
In the far flung future of…for all intents and purposes, 1967…the Fuji Astronautical Flight Center, Japan’s answer to Cape Canaveral, prepares a sixth manned mission to Mars. The previous five met mysterious ends at the hands of equally-mysterious UFOs supposedly camped out in interplanetary space. “Your job,” a FAFC flunky tells the doomed sixth crew of gullible space monkeys, “is to determine what’s stopping us from reaching Mars.”
I knew this would happen, if for no other reason than that this is the eleventh motion picture in the Star Trek franchise/canon.
I don’t know whether Diary of the Dead was an honestly-bungled attempt to move the zombie movie forward as a format…or a flagrantly half-assed attempt to make up for Land of the Dead. I can’t see George Romaro’s heart. Anything is possible. Making a decent zombie flick only seems an impossible task thanks to my relative inexperience. Dawn of the Dead was the last great hope and that was 1978. The wave crested, and it’s been rolling back ever since we left that mall. Why can no one admit that mall was the last good idea George Romaro had? Why must we have Diary of the Dead?
I first reviewed Falling Down on May 6th, 2000, triumphantly trumpeted as “our 150th review!” As if that were some kind of achievement. That review is still available in all its poverty and horror. It, like so many of my early reviews, deserves to be replaced, or quietly buried. (So why link to it, right? For the Internet’s sake, friend. For the Internet’s sake.)
Most commentators believe the title refers to that elephant in the room no one wants to talk about. Director Gus Van Sant claims that it refers to that poor pachyderm from the Chinese proverb, the one getting groped by five blind men, each of whom believes he has something different under his hand. The very subjectivity of that ambiguous, titular word epitomizes Elephant‘s problems with subjectivity as a whole. By attempting to present a subjective view of one (fictional) American high school shooting Van Sant, quite unawares, paints himself into corner. So with us all.
Conceived in the wake of Columbine and completed in 2001, Zero Day sat on a shelf for two years before it saw the light of day. Something happened in the fall of 2001, on some date I can never quite remember, despite the gnawing sensation that we, as a nation, swore never to forget. In any case, The Event (whatever it was) panicked Zero Day‘s distributors into canceling the film’s release. Undeterred, writer/director Ben Coccio used the time to do what all serious creative people do with their stalled projects: tinker. The result gained a limited release in 2003. The fact that I only heard about this film last week should tell you just how “limited.” I like to believe that, even in the midst of 2003’s War Fever, I would’ve noticed a “school shooter” movie opening up down the street. Yet, in the course of researching my next novel (goddamn that feels good to type) I’ve discovered three from that year alone. (Thanks, Variety–you industry rag, you). So here we are, with the first.
This was one of those movies, purposely not screened for the critics in advance of its release last year. The movie industry is a vain, attention-hungry animal, and it never shies from the media spotlight without good reason. Occasionally a movie comes along so hobbled, so hackneyed, screening it for criticism becomes an open solicitation for capital-T, Trouble.