My Thoughts on Watchmen or What Kind of Fan Are You?

So Watchmen, if you're a fan of genre films is a definite must see. It is an ambitious piece of cinema that does not compromise what it wants to do for its entire running time. While it's not perfect, in terms of its recreation of the book there are some deviations, and there are flaws (the tone of the film jumps around a bit, and I still haven't decided if it worked for me) but it's a better viewing experience for it. It's one of the first, if not the first comic book adaptations that works because less because of slavish devotion to what's on the page (but to be clear, it's pretty damned tight to the page) and more because of another quality that it shares with the original book: it invites discussion. Within five minutes after leaving the theater, the friends I watched it with were already talking about the purpose behind the level of gore and the way the fight scenes were filmed (My take: Given the very adult themes examined, and the meta nature of the source material? All the exaggerated bits of violence are "grown-up" version of the campy onomatopoeia that was in the old Batman TV show, or in comics. It wasn't a cool way to show violence, but rather, an in film context way to remind the viewer that this is a comic book.). That barely cracks the surface of the sort of conversations we got into afterwards.

Now I said that this is a must see for genre film fans. I didn't say comic book fans, because there are two sorts of us. There's the fan that's excited at the prospect of comic book properties being treated with the respect they deserve. Then there's the sort that aren't happy with anything but complete carbon-copy translation, and even then they are prepared to hate it before they've seen one frame. In the weeks leading up to the film I heard plenty of comic book fans voice their displeasure with the film, from the fairly standard jabs at Zach Snyder's use of the speed-cranking slow-mo technique (which, while it shows up, is restrained and works for what it's there for) and the lack of a certain cephalopod. Then there was word from "fans" who had apparently gotten to see early screenings of the film, claiming that the principal cast couldn't act. Now that the movie is actually out I've heard plenty of intelligent discussion about it, both positive and negative, but there are still comic book fans who're bound and determined to hate on the flick just because it exists. These fans, even in the face of being able to discuss their fandom in an way that doesn't patronize or disrespect the material are unable to accept the idea of what is precious to them being delivered to people outside of their niche group.

Depending on what sort of comic book fan you are, you may not want to see Watchmen. As for myself, I'm glad that I saw it because even I didn't like it I would have had a lot to talk about. Regardless of where you fall in your opinion on the movie, you can't deny that a lot of care and thought went into it being made. If you're like me, I'm pretty sure you'll feel like that alone deserve at least a look. So, what kind of fan are you?

Comic Book flicks are a lot like Westerns were back in the day...

...and they're likely due for a bust, just like Westerns were. I just hope that Watchmen is more The Wild Bunch than Heaven's Gate. This is where I'll be in about three hours:

I'll give my thoughts on Sunday.

Links Before the Storm

One more day of easy content before I drop a gem...

The end times are drawing close. Dr. Dre's Detox is dropping this year (supposedly), Rae's Cuban Linx 2 is dropping this year (supposedly) and Tarantino's finally bringing out Inglourious Basterds. Peep it at Yahoo! Movies in HD.

The A-Number One rare Hip Hop archiving site, T.R.O.Y just posted up an essay on Public Enemy's classic "Night of the Living Baseheads" that you can read here.

Magnolia's genre films wing Magnet (who released the amazing Let The Right One In last year) will be bringing Ong-Bak 2 to the U.S, according to 24fps.

Keep it locked to What's Good folks, Wu-Tang vs. The Abbott coming tomorrow...

Friday Night Films - The Trailer Drop

I haven't done this in a minute, mostly 'cause I haven't been feeling most film news or even wanting to watch movies lately. Shame on me, I know, but I'm gonna try to get back into the swing of it. Have some new trailers while I get back up to speed.


Coraline Web Trailer


Banlieue 13 - Ultimatum (aka District 13 - Ultimatum), the sequel to 2004's French action film Banlieue 13.


Teaser for the upcoming old-school Wuxia flick, Chasing Shadows


Red Band (for violence) trailer for Mutant Chronicles

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Friday Night Films - Frank Miller, RZA and Stephen Chow

It's that time again, people. I put you up on movie news, you enjoy it. Or not. Anyhow, here they is!

First up, Frank Miller's about ready to release his version of The Spirit upon the populous. I'm not psyched because it's gone from looking like Sin City 2 to just plain bad. Not that I didn't enjoy Sin City, but if you know your history, it ain't The Spirit. Nevertheless, the man who thought that a modern day propaganda comic with Batman taking on Al-Qaeda was a good idea soldiers on, this time with his sites set on Buck Rogers. Perhaps if this deal goes through he'll finally start making films with a rich color palette, and actually take the source material into account when adapting something that is not is own. I doubt it, but one can dream.

In news to get excited about (maybe), after years of scoring films the RZA's going to step behind the camera. He's written and is going to direct his debut, a Kung Fu flick entitled The Man With the Iron Fist, according to XXL.com. The news is bit old, but aside from the standard facts (Eli Roth producing, RZA requiring the blessing from Tarantino to give directing a try) it reveals a tiny plot detail that the action will take place in place called Jungle Village where each member has the name of an animal. Also a while back Eli Roth confirmed that the movie's going to be R-rated, so it seems like this is going to be an amalgamation of old school Kung Fu flick and stylized efforts like Afro Samurai. Of course this is just me making guesses. In any case, I'll be keeping a watch out for info on this one.

Apparently Stephen Chow of Kung Fu Hustle and Shaolin Soccer fame is out of the director's chair for the upcoming Seth Rogen scripted Green Hornet flick, according to Twitch. They're guessing that "creative differences" translates to Chow's ego not being kept in check. With rumors about rifts with Sammo Hung and his frequent co-star Ng Man Tat (who ultimately stopped collaborating with Chow after Shaolin Soccer), I wouldn't doubt that to be the case. In this interview excerpt from last year he said he wouldn't direct anything he hadn't written himself, so it stands to reason there were things he wanted to change about the script that Rogen and company weren't keen on. He's still going to be playing Kato, but there's no word of who will be taking up the directing duties just yet.

I'll close up with some trailers that caught my eye last week. To start, here's the teaser for Vanitas by Jesus Orellana. This whole thing was done by Orellana himself, no assistants at all. The feature length film doesn't exist yet and this was done to drum up interest that would help him create the film. It's dope all on its own, but to realize that one guy did it makes it that much more amazing.


Another animated feature to look forward to is Miyamoto Musashi, produced by the Production I.G. studio who're responsible for anime classics like Blood: The Last Vampire, Ghost in the Shell, and the animated sequence in Tarantino's Kill Bill. The upcoming film is penned by Mamoru Oshii, the man behind the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell films and many others.


Finally, this isn't a video but it's necessary viewing. A few stills have trickled out from Tarantino's upcoming WWII flick Inglourious Basterds, and a new one surfaced this week of Melanie Laurent as the film's heroine Shoshanna Dreyfus. I was already excited that this movie was actually getting made after years of Tarantino talking about it, but for some reason this image (you can peep the others here) speaks to me.


It is likely that my penchant for women doing violence with bladed weapons has caught me once again. Well, I'm off to work at my Oneechanbara fanfiction. Have a good weekend everybody!

Friday Night Films - Early Christmas Presents

Knee deep in a personal writing project, so unlike the week before last where I said it was going to be skimpy on movie news and then lied, I'm actually going to keep it pretty low-key.

Twitch has been on a tear recently, dropping off news on lot of dope looking movies: The Russian/Japanese animated feature First Squad, the gorgeous looking Goemon, and the twisted (and aptly named) Sick Girl.

They're crowning things off with a weekend showing of Robert Pratten’s Mindflesh. Described body-horror in the vein of The Fly, Videodrome, and Scanners, it certainly won't be for everybody, but if it sounds like your cup of tea, peep out the entire feature film at Twitch from now until December the 14th.

New Wallace and Gromit. New Wallace and Gromit. New Wallace and Gromit! You lucky bastards in the UK get to see the new joint A Matter of Loaf or Death on Christmas Day on BBC One with a DVD release in March. No clue on when us folks in the States will have this gem dropped on us.

I'll leave y'all a PSA from Sick Girl on keeping quiet in movie theaters. I can relate to this, trust. Not safe for work, so be warned. Enjoy the weekend!

No film news tonight.

Gonna take some time to work on some writing, maybe go through the backlog of DVDs I haven't had a chance to watch yet. I won't leave you totally high and dry though, so here's a video. It's a short compilation of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Turkey Day bumpers. Up until Comedy Central stopped the marathon, I spent a lot of my Thanksgivings bouncing between family and the TV to catch as much of the 30 hours of MST3k episodes as I could. I owe a lot of my love of b-cinema to this series, and I still watch it pretty regularly. Enjoy!

Friday Night Films

Gonna be pretty lazy with the film news this week, so pardon the kid. Some follow-up about the Oldboy remake that Stephen Spielberg and Will Smith are looking to put together. One of the writers from I Am Legend, Mark Protosevitch, has signed on to pen the film, and in the cop out portion of the news, Will Smith told Film School Rejects that the rights that Spielberg acquired were for the original Oldboy manga and not the Chan Wook Park film. So no need to worry about Smith and Spielberg having to go anyplace outside of their respective comfort zones, but it's a cop out as most people who know about the manga (and I'm willing to bet this includes Smith and Spielberg) were brought to it from the movie. So you know the movie's going to be in mind when they undertake this.

The Playlist (a really cool blog where they focus on movies from a music standpoint, particularly the involvement of music supervisors on a film) reports that X-Men: First Class is going ahead, written by Josh Schwartz, a writer responsible for Gossip Girl and The O.C.. Ladies and gentlemen, I can't and I won't stand for this. I'm not a huge stan for the X-Men, as a fictional universe it's got plenty of problems, and if this were called X-Men: Year One, Young X-Men or something else original, I wouldn't bat an eye. The problem is that they're taking the name for the movie from one of the comic books that actually get the X-Men concept right.

Written by Jeff Parker, the stories all center around all the OG members of the X-Men in their first years as a team. It cuts out all of the fat out, the super complicated plotlines, the contrived angst and just concentrates on fun stories. Gets the whole growing up different thing down, with a lot of classic comic book action (in a good way). I know it's early, but I have a feeling we're going get a lot crappy music, pretty white kids with problems and lukewarm super-power effects. Kinda like a movie that's dropping this weekend that I'll get into in a second. Anyhow, go cop the First Class books at your earliest convenience, 'cause not only do you get great stories up front, you also get adorable backup features by folks like Colleen Coover. As an example, here's Marvel Girl dealing with some baby ducks:
Click for full size.

If the movie contains this, I take back everything I said.

If you haven't already seen them, there's some nice trailers out this week: The Wrestler, Coraline to name a couple. Two more caught my eye this week: The Wilson Yip helmed Ip Man a bio-pic about the man that trained Bruce Lee in Wing Chun. Donnie Yen stars in the lead.


The second is for a Blaxploitation homage/spoof called Black Dynamite. There's really nothing I can say that the trailer doesn't do perfectly. Go here to peep the NSFW trailer, and to learn more about the film. The one-sheets in particular are pitch perfect.

Huh. Not quite as lazy as I'd planned. Well, now I'll leave you with what is the first installment in a series: Why 'Let the Right One In' kicks 'Twilight' in the Teeth.

When sunlight hits vampires in Twilight, this happens.


When sunglight hits vampires in Let The Right One In, this happens.


Have a good weekend, folks.

Friday Night Films

It's all about film news and drops today. I'll start with the bad news and roll on into the good.

You've all seen Oldboy, right? If you haven't, I would recommend getting with it, tootsweet. It hit the U.S. when we had a pretty heavy deluge of revenge films and turned the concept on its ear. Equal parts violent and poetic, it (along with the other films in Park Chan-wook's vengeance trilogy, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) is less about taking revenge, but more about how useless and ugly the act is. Hollywood's been talking about doing a remake for a while now, initially with Justin Lin attached to direct. This didn't seem like a terribly good idea because aside from the fact that the movie doesn't really need to be remade, Lin didn't really seem like he had the means to do it right.

Now, today, Variety is reporting that Steven Spielberg and Will Smith are in talks to work together on their own version of Oldboy. From a technical standpoint, if this goes through I have no doubt that the movie will be very well put together. Given both of the principals having a reluctance or outright inability to go as dark as a proper retelling of Oldboy would need them to, though, I don't really forsee it being faithful in tone and meaning to the original. Ultimately though, it could lead to more people checking out the original so it ain't all bad.

The next bit of bad news doesn't really have much of a upside for those of you out there who are comic readers. One of my favorite series from DC's Vertigo line was The Losers by Andy Diggle and Jock. It told the story of a group of special forces operatives that are out for revenge against the CIA when they're betrayed and left for dead by their handler. It was like a great, smart action movie. Gritty, full of snappy dialogue and just a damned fun read. Since Hollywood's just as eager to snap up comic book properties as they are to remake Asian films, a film version's been in talks for a while now. Originally it had Peter Berg attached and he seemed to have a flair for enjoyable action movies (The Rundown wasn't life-changing, but it was fun, and I've heard good things about The Kingdom). Now he's off and the new director does not inspire confidence. Slyvain White's previous credits include Stomp the Yard, a lot DTV and music video work and CHUD is reporting that he's in the directing chair for The Losers. This is pretty much the exact reason why a lot of comic book, video game and other adaptations of nerdy stuff to motion pictures don't work. Hollywood tends to grab someone that's great at getting a product out there, workman directors that are clutch players for getting a movie done on time and under budget. I'm sure White's a champ as far as that's concerned, but I seriously doubt he's going to be able to get the energy of the books right. Honestly, if you've got a jones for a good action flick, just cop the trades. I even provided you a link to get the first book for the low-low at In Stock Trades. I'm nice like that.

Yeesh. So this isn't a complete downer, a couple of pieces of good news. First up, anybody who's a anime fan and an 80s baby will remember the anthology film Robot Carnival, a joint I recall staying up to watch late nights on TBS when I should've had my ass in bed. Genius Party and its sequel Genius Party Beyond instantly reminded me of that. Top notch directors and character designers in the world of Anime (you've seen their work in Cowboy Bebop, Macross, and the animated sequence in Kill Bill Vol. 1 among other places) putting it down on short films. Genius Party just had a showing at the 2008 New York-Tokyo Film Grand Prix and you can read a report from the festival by Khalid Strickland at The Smoking Section where he speaks on it a bunch of other dope flicks. The trailers for the original and the sequel (which was released in Japan in October) have me incredibly interested:

Genius Party


Genius Party Beyond


Finally, I don't go as crazy for Pixar as some of my nerd brethren do. I definitely respect and admire what they do, but I'm not apt to rush out on opening night to see their films. That said, I've been looking forward to their next joint Up ever since I saw a hi-def still back in April (ask me nice and I'll slang you the full sized joint). Disney just released a new teaser for it and man...just go peep it at /Film. I need it in my life, like yesterday.

Enjoy the weekend, y'all.