Saturday, May 9, 2009
Watching The Watchmen
Pam and I were having a conversation about how we didn't care about big movies anymore. I say its because we were burned one two many times. We enjoyed the Bournes, but felt unfulfilled after a Mission Impossible sequel. Neither of us could get excited about the new Star Trek. There are exceptions to this rule. Pam is looking forward to the new Terminator product.
Somehow our discussion of big movies evolved into plans to go to the Academy Theater on 78th and Stark to go see Watchmen. It is a neighborhood of autoshops, places where you can get a Patty Melt and a Bloody Mary like Thatchers, and couple of pizza joints. The Academy is proof that you an old auditorium can be pleasantly reconstituted and plexed. They serve their wine in a glass and have daycare. I think admission is three bucks for flicks soon on their way to DVD. (Idea for a poem -- movies leaving theaters for cable/DVD/Netflix/Basic Cable/LifeTime and AMC/DVD cutout racks at Hollywood and Blockbuster could be compared to cute farm animals going to the feed lot and then to slaughterhouse, grocery store and then to your plate.
I wasn't really aware of the whole Watchmen phenomena until some of my students were reading it and I saw several Watchman hoddies among the laptop gaming clique. Librarian Z filled me in a little bit. Pam then read the comic, which looked like too big a project before seeing the movie, but I was struck by some impressions she shared about it along with some other comments I saw and read at a glance. Movie comics are pretty sketchy, but then I realized that I was basing my impression on Dark Knight and The Spirit. So actually my issue is probably with Frank Miller, who I liked best when he interviewed Will Eisner (then made hash out of Eisner's great contribution to pop culture and American comics, The Spirit.
The Watchmen was an intriguing and engaging movie experience for me for a number of reasons. Mainly because seeing it was a new world complete, and I entered it with no expectations. The speculative world of what 85 would be like if Nixon was to run for five terms also was very cool with dead on pop culture references with kind of look alike imitators for everyone from McLaughlin Group panels to Annie Leibovitz at a photo shoot, to Nixon and Kissinger jowling about Nuclear War.
Then there are the superheroes with baggage and disconnects, just like real folk. The actors were almost entirely unknowns to a a good part of the planet and that added to the buy in for this wild tale which covered everything from nuclear war to being true to yourself for nearly three hours.
The look of the film and the consistency of really cool special effects helped it out as well. There is a kind of nerdly joy in this movie, that I haven't really seen realized in a similar way since I first saw the first Matrix movie. Look forward to checking out the comic next, but I doubt you'll see me at Wolverine ever or Star Trek maybe until it shows up at the Academy with the feed lot trucks parked out back.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:06 PM
Comments:
Post a Comment