Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) fight crime in WATCHMEN
WATCHMEN (Zack Snyder, 2009)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Saturday, July 27, 5:00
Tickets: $12, in person only, may be applied to museum admission within thirty days, same-day screenings free with museum admission, available at Film and Media Desk beginning at 9:30 am
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
www.watchmenmovie.warnerbros.com
After more than twenty years, it finally arrived. Zack (300) Snyder’s brilliant, near panel-by-panel re-creation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s genre-defining Watchmen doesn’t update the setting one bit. It’s still an alternate history, a dystopian 1980s with Richard Nixon in office, celebrating victory in Vietnam while trying to with the Cold War against the Russians. That era’s very real preoccupations might not quite match our own, but in this age of international terrorism, fear of violent death is still used as an effective political tool. Snyder’s bold move, to keep the ’80s setting intact, complete with hair, color, and style, is visually stunning, if oddly disconcerting; he also does an outstanding job going back to the ’50s and ’70s, following Gibbons’s beautiful design and Moore’s musical sensibility. (The soundtrack includes obvious songs by Dylan, Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, and Wagner as well as a killer “Desolation Row” by My Chemical Romance over the closing credits.) Yet the genius lies in the universal nature of Moore’s story. Snyder maintains his atmosphere of dread, of people being tiny cogs caught in a machine manufacturing fear to control humanity, and it works. Because for many, that same system operates today, albeit with different faces, different bad guys, and different silhouettes and color schemes. Snyder’s refusal to update the superficial points out all the more strongly the essential power of Moore’s observations. The look is superb, with Gibbons’s characters walking right off the page and into three dimensions, breathing humans that fully embody their two-dimensional origins, often more fascinating out of costume than dressed for duty.
Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup) turns into Dr. Manhattan in WATCHMEN
The story, of course, is more difficult to transfer intact. There are added scenes that weren’t panels as well as inevitable elisions and telescoping of the original twelve-issue limited series. The sheer genius of Moore’s metafiction, his exploration of the Nietzschean “superman” and his comic book counterparts, and the supratextural additions, such as his deftly woven counterpoint comic-within-a-comic Tales of the Black Freighter, don’t all make it to the big screen. How could they? The movie’s more than two and a half hours already. If you didn’t read the book, you might miss the metafiction, the counterpoint, and possibly much of the plot, but the awesome Rorschach and the amazing Dr. Manhattan are psychologically and visually pitch-perfect. See it for the characters, at the very least (played by Billy Crudup, Jackie Earle Haley, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Goode, Malin Akerman, and Carla Gugino bringing to life Nite Owl, the Silk Spectre, Ozymandias, and others, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan nearly stealing the show as the Comedian). Mirroring the destruction/rebuilding of the narrative arc, Moore’s book itself effectively deconstructed the comic book superhero genre, blowing it to bits and pulling it to pieces, setting the stage for the genre’s rebirth, the graphic novel creative explosion of the 1980s and ’90s. Perhaps it is not coincidental that the film came out a time when that genre was experiencing a rebirth of its own, with The Dark Knight and Iron Man garnering both critical praise and public acclaim. But Moore’s commentary on the twentieth century, true compassion, and humankind’s messy urge to annihilate and save itself at the same time still makes a hell of a lot of sense today. Watchmen is screening July 27 at 5:00 as part of the MoMA series “A View from the Vaults: Warner Bros. Today,” which consists of thirty-one films from the last twenty years of movies coming out of the famed studio, including the Harry Potter, Dark Knight, and Lord of the Ring series as well as such wide-ranging fare as Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, Ted Braun’s Darfur Now, Jay Roach’s The Campaign, Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck.
Daniel Day-Lewis gives a spectacular, Oscar-winning performance as an independent oil man in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Day-Lewis, in remarkable voice, absolutely embodies Daniel Plainview, a determined, desperate man digging for black gold in turn-of-the-century California. His first strike comes at a heavy price as he loses one of his men in a tragic accident, so he adopts the worker’s infant son, raising H.W. (Dillon Freasier) as his own. The growth of his company leads him to Little Boston, a small town that has oil just seeping out of its pores. But after not allowing Paul Sunday (Paul Dano), the charismatic preacher who runs the local Church of the Third Revelation, to say a prayer over the community’s first derrick, Plainview begins his descent into hell. Using Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! as a starting point (and employing echoes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in addition to the obvious reference, George Stevens’s classic 1956 oil flick Giant), writer-director Anderson (Boogie Nights, The Master) has created a thrilling epic about greed, power, and corruption as well as jealousy, murder, and, above all, family, where oil gushes out of the ground with fire and brimstone. Robert Elswit’s beautiful, Oscar-winning cinematography is so gritty and realistic, audiences will be reaching for their faces to wipe the oil and blood off. The piercing, classically based score, composed by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, builds to a mind-blowing crescendo by the end of the film — a finale that is likely to be much talked about and widely criticized. Filmed in the same location — Marfa, Texas — where Giant was set, There Will Be Blood is an unforgettable journey into the dark heart of one man’s soul. The film is screening in a DCP projection July 27 at 5:30 and July 28 at 1:00 as part of the Museum of the Moving Image series “See It Big! The American Epic,” which continues July 28 at 4:30 with longtime Christian Science Monitor film critic Peter Rainer introducing Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, followed by a book signing of his new Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.
Back in 2000, documentarian Nina Davenport made Always a Bridesmaid, in which she shared her views on being single and nearly thirty as she worked as a wedding videographer. A dozen years later, in the deeply personal First Comes Love, she turns the camera on her private life once again as she contemplates being single, childless, and forty-one — and takes matters into her own hands, deciding to have a baby on her own. With her best friend, Amy, by her side and her college friend, Eric, agreeing to be the sperm donor, Nina details every critical moment and more as she goes on this intimate journey, opening up her life for all to see. She discusses things with her family, particularly her adoring mother and her distant, hard-to-please father, as well as other relatives and friends, who give their opinions on whether they think it’s a good idea. Several of her acquaintances have also either recently had a baby on their own or are considering it as well, revealing the changing patterns of the American family in the twenty-first century, especially in New York City. Serving as writer, director, producer, editor, cinematographer, and principal subject, Davenport, in the style of one of her Harvard mentors, Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March), holds nothing back, which at times becomes overly self-indulgent and a bit much to take, but the combination of her eagerness and her fears, along with her willingness to show it all, ultimately makes First Comes Love the most human of stories. The film is running July 24-30 at the IFC Center, with Davenport participating in Q&As following the 7:35 screenings on July 24 and 25; it also premieres on HBO on July 29.
For more than thirty years, Cameron Mackintosh’s musical theater production of Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel, Les Misérables, has been entertaining audiences in Paris, on London’s West End, on Broadway, and on tours around the world. Fans have been eagerly anticipating the film version for decades, and now that it’s here, they can let out a big sigh of . . . what, relief? Regret? Revolution? Revulsion? Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) has put together a lavish, star-studded spectacle that ends up biting off a whole lot more than it can chew, which doesn’t go over well in the slums of early-nineteenth-century Paris. Hugh Jackman is wonderfully cast as Jean Valjean, a valiant man who has spent nineteen brutal years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. Russell Crowe tries hard as Inspector Javert, who is determined to bring Valjean to justice after he breaks his suffocating parole. Changing his life — and his name — Valjean becomes a model citizen, even mayor, and seeks to help the disadvantaged, including Fantine (Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Anne Hathaway), a former employee of his who will do whatever it takes to provide for her young daughter, Cosette (Isabelle Allen). The first half of the film, which goes from 1815 to 1823, develops well enough, with strong, emotional performances by Jackman and Hathaway and a haughty “Master of the House” number led by Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen as innkeepers taking care of — and taking advantage of — Cosette. But things start falling apart quickly once the story jumps to 1832 and an older Cosette (Amanda Seyfried) has fallen in love with young revolutionary Marius Pontmercy (Eddie Redmayne), while Javert is still hunting down Valjean. The budding romance and coming battle are simply dreadful, as are the songs. (“Do You Hear the People Sing?” We wish we didn’t. “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”? Alas, just about every seat in the large theater was taken.) The overly melodramatic final scenes, which seem to never end, suck any life that was left over from the first hour or so, which had at least created a compelling mood and intriguing characters. Unable to decide whether it’s a historical epic or a timeless romance, Les Misérables ends up being neither. Perhaps the best way to see the Oscar-nominated film is with a cadre of fellow fanatics belting out the tunes along with the characters, and you can do just that on July 25 when the JCC in Manhattan presents a communal sing-along as part of its summer “Up on the Roof” series, with everyone encouraged to join in with Hugh, Anne, Amanda, Russell, Helena, Sacha, and the rest of the cast, giving a whole new meaning to “Do You Hear the People Sing?”