2 posts categorized "Graphic Novel"

March 05, 2009

WATCHMEN

Welcome!

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.ColeSmithey.comThis ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 

 

And Now For Something Completely Different
The Good, the Bad, and the Nude
By Cole Smithey

ColeSmithey.comDave Gibbons's hardboiled superhero graphic novel is brought to stunning visual life by director Zach Snyder.

Here is a convoluted adult fantasy that provides an off-key political tone to its alternate reality of 1985 America.

Richard Nixon is still President and the Doomsday Clock forever sits at five minutes to the hour of imminent apocalypse thanks to a Soviet nuclear threat.

ColeSmithey.com

Put out of work by Nixon's decree outlawing masked avengers, unless they work for the government, a group of former superheroes known as the Watchmen variously reconnect after the violent murder of their macho former member the Comedian AKA Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) whose demise implies a similar fate for the rest of the group.

ColeSmithey.com

Rorschach (devilishly played by Jackie Earle Haley), in his ever-morphing inkblot mask and raspy voice, narrates the complex mystery that plays out with richly designed flashbacks that reveal the personal histories of the likes of Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman) and her atomically transmogrified yet anatomically correct love interest Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup).

ColeSmithey.com

Outrageous sexual elements and extreme violence give "Watchmen" its well-deserved hard R rating. Opposed to its child-friendly poster, this is not your run-of-the-mill action/adventure movie for the kids. At over two and a half hours, "Watchman" is a full-frontal adult sci-fi satire that's as enjoyable as it is thematically confounding. There's something here to make every member of the audience squirm.

ColeSmithey.com

Heroism is an occupation for freelance reprobates in the cynical deconstructionist world that writer Alan Moore ("V for Vendetta") concocted for the Watchmen. The cigar-chomping, Hustler-reading rapist, the Comedian leaves behind him a trail of pain, death, and  disaster--from Viet Nam to America's protest-filled streets that he uses as an excuse to blast away at dissenters in jubilant fits of vengeance. But revenge for what? For his own self-loathing?

Blake's rape of Laurie Jupiter's Betty Page-inspired hero mother Sally, turns a crucial plot key later in the movie. If Edward Blake's Comedian, a government sponsored nihilistic wack job, is a representation of the "good guys," then who's on the other side and where are they? The ominous quote "Who watches the Watchmen?" hovers over the movie.

ColeSmithey.com

There's an inherent dynamic tension that comes from Moore's iconography of dysfunctional identities, even if their philosophical ideas typically come across as ambiguous or, at their worst, just plain wrongheaded. As is the case for "smartest man in the world" Ozymandias AKA Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) whose preoccupation with Genghis Khan fuels his plan for world domination. Veidt is an effeminate polar opposite of the testosterone oozing Edward Blake.

ColeSmithey.com

The film's opening assassination sequence is a disorienting spree of ultra violence that's a close cousin to the stylized brutality of "A Clockwork Orange." Edward Blake watches Nixon on an old television in his high-rise apartment when his attacker bursts through the door and we get a wall-smashing fist fight from the Gene Hackman era of ass-kicking. On his black costume, Blake wears a smiley face yellow button that was a symbol of the drug happy '60s, and donates to it a lovely red blood drop that captures the film's ketchup-on-mustard visual appeal.

ColeSmithey.com

Director Zach Snyder ("300") has a field day emphasizing explicit aspects of the colorful characters' sexualities to tweak the emotional underpinnings of their actions. It's in this soft-core realm that the movie smashes into walls of physical and psychological disturbance that offer the audience graphic sexual consolation for a barrage of blood spurting and splattering that goes on. Billy Crudup's scientist Jon Osterman AKA Dr. Manhattan is the only genuine superhero of the group by way of a 1959 science lab accident that found him trapped in an Intrinsic Field Subtractor. Osterman's atoms were separated and have left him in a quantum universe devoid of time.

ColeSmithey.com

Snyder parades the blue-skinned Dr. Manhattan's sculpted physique and semi-erect penis through the second half of the film as a definite phallic talisman of male domination overseeing humanity. Snyder's illustrative decision is a departure from Dave Gibbons' graphic novel renderings that gave the character a more understated nude profile. The government sent Dr. Manhattan to Viet Nam to end the war, and his ability to change his size to a King Kong-scaled giant won the hearts and minds of the Viet Cong. These are the kind of pushy ideas and propaganda images that Snyder wants the audience to stew over indefinitely after seeing the movie.

ColeSmithey.com

Pop songs like Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'," Nat King Cole's "Unforgettable," and Leonard Cohen's ubiquitous "Hallelujah" provide familiar if ironic musical counterpoint. There's a self awareness here of the rippling effect that the filmmakers clearly intend "Watchmen" to have on its modern cult audience.

ColeSmithey.com

"Watchmen" is campy fun. It's not hard to imagine audiences yelling retorts to the screen in the same way "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" set off its a social phenomenon of audience interaction. There's plenty here to draw viewers back for repeat screenings to dissect every shiny piece of eye-candy, gore, and skintight appeal.

ColeSmithey.com

The dialogue is snappy and raw. It's a movie that has a lot more in common with midnight movies than it does with Batman or Spider-Man. For its salivating fans and audiences itching for something completely different from the Hollywood superhero model, there's much ferocity to sample here.

Taste the fury Babyface.

(Warner Brothers) Rated R. 160 mins.

4 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

April 26, 2006

V FOR VENDETTA

Welcome!

ColeSmithey.com

Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does. This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

Get cool rewards when you click on the button to pledge your support through Patreon.

Thanks a lot acorns!

Your kind generosity keeps the reviews coming!

ColeSmithey.com

 

You Don’t Know What Freedom Is

Political Satire Hits the Ceiling
By Cole Smithey

V_for_vendettaScripted by Andy and Larry Wachowski ("The Matrix" trilogy) "V For Vendetta" is a razor-sharp cinematic reinterpretation of Alan Moore’s dissident 1988 political satire graphic novel set in a slightly futuristic Britain.

Natalie Portman’s intense portrayal of a civilian polarized into rebellion anchors the movie as a spirited female protagonist with bite.

At a point in history when George Orwell’s dystopian nightmare vision of "1984" has been surpassed by a deceptive brand of fascism that goes under the anesthetizing moniker of free trade capitalism, "V For Vendetta" comes across as a scathingly subversive political satire.

Screen Shot 2024-05-03 at 7.01.33 PM

The film seamlessly folds together elements of "1984," "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World" and "The Diary Of Anne Frank" with superhero mythology and a dash of spaghetti western to form a highly original story about the dangers of corruption, media manipulation, and pervasive government repression exercised through fear.

The screenwriters have reshaped the novel’s problematic protagonist Evey (Portman) as an intelligent and sensitive young woman who becomes a victim of two different brands of Stockholm syndrome — one perpetrated by her violent government, and one by that fascistic regime’s most treacherous terrorist enemy.

Vendetta

Just as the title implies, violence begets payment in the same coin. Although author Alan Moore has had his name removed from the film, "V For Vendetta" is by far the best film version of Moore’s stories, which include "From Hell" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen."

Vendetta

After being rescued from a late night street hassle with government goons by a mask-wearing Guy Fawkes-inspired revolutionary named V (Hugo Weaving), Evey’s mysterious savior takes her on a rooftop date to witness the destruction of the Old Bailey, London's criminal court building — complete with fireworks.

Evey helps V escape from the police after he stages an attack on the broadcast station where she works. The brilliant visual style on display invites the audience as welcome participants to the story's subversive action.

Portman

Debut director James McTeigue artfully mitigates the distraction of a character whose face you never see by focusing on the way other characters react to V. Hugo Weaving’s pitch-perfect enunciation of V’s incendiary dialogue is the capper. The story shifts through a troubling maze of events once V takes Evey into his confidence in his underground lair. There the highly educated revolutionary has collected cultural artifacts that were long ago confiscated from society and private homes by the government.

Effective flashbacks divulge V’s polarizing experiences as a prisoner of a government-operated concentration camp where he suffered an explosion that left him scarred from head to toe.

Vendetta

The anti-hero is an athletic esthete who uses only throwing knives against his assailants — an amendment to the graphic novel by the Wachowski brothers that references the working class weapon of the spaghetti western hero in Sergio Sollima’s seminal 1968 movie "Run, Man, Run."

Screen Shot 2024-05-03 at 7.02.00 PM

"V For Vendetta" is a glorious piece of pop culture subversive cinema that operates on manifold levels. On the surface, it’s a love story set in the depths of social despair, but it’s also a visionary tale of social uprising.

Here is a cogent reflection of the split between freedom and repression across a social terrain that seems more native than alien; therein lies its central abstraction, a clarion call to action.

Rated R. 131 mins. 

4 Stars

Cozy Cole

ColeSmithey.com

Featured Video

SMART NEW MEDIA® Custom Videos

COLE SMITHEY’S MOVIE WEEK

COLE SMITHEY’S CLASSIC CINEMA

Throwback Thursday


Podcast Series