All Along the Watchtower
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 5, 2009 - 6 Comments
MALIN AKERMAN as Silk Spectre II and PATRICK WILSON as Nite Owl II in WATCHMEN
Big opening weekend. Last night I saw Watchmen, the last word in comic book movies. And as I left the theatre, someone pressed a card into my palm promoting the opening of Bruce McDonald‘s cool zombie movie, Pontypool, featuring a Q & A with its star Stephen McHattie—who also has a minor role in Watchmen. On the invitation, Watchmen‘s title was printed in bigger type than Pontypool. I guess that’s called counter-programming. More on Pontypool and One Week later, but now for the main event.
I came to Watchmen as a civilian. Hadn’t read the graphic novel, and didn’t want to confuse my palate by boning up before the screening. Figured I might as well get the benefit of seeing the movie fresh, without knowing much about it. Well, not much except for the media hype, which has tended to dwell on dueling anxieties—on the one hand, fans of the graphic novel were fretting that the movie might compromise its hard-core pulp purity of its doomsday scenario; and on the other, industry types wondered if a mass audience of the uninitiated was ready for an ultra-violent R-rated movie without movie stars that’s almost three hours long and amounts to an operatic essay on Cold War existentialism costumed as an comic book blockbuster.
Maybe I’m just impressionable, but this Watchmen neophyte was, well, blown away. I mean, I think I was blown away. Because this is the kind of movie that tries to blow you away and then asks you to clean up the smithereens and ponder their significance. And Watchmen does seem significant. With brutal ambition, it trumps every comic book movie that’s gone before. Based on a 12-episode series of DC comics created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons in 1986 and 1987, and later compiled as a graphic novel, it’s the grail of superhero adaptations. It’s also the first proudly adult comic book movie, with graphic violence and frontal nudity—at least on the male side. (One of the Watchmen, a the radioactively reconstituted Dr. Manhattan, is a blue-skinned, white-eyed, stark-naked superman who struts around in his anatomically correct, heroically endowed birthday suit like a man-god looking for salvation on a nude beach.) Thematically, meanwhile, this maybe the first comic book movie that finally pays off the dark promise of that first Batman by Tim Burton. It’s not just that its costumed crusaders are anti-heroes. These days, every superhero worth his salt—Spider Man, Iron Man, Hellboy, Hancock—is an anti-hero in a liberal deconstruction of heroism. But what’s remarkable about the Watchmen is that the moral ground they’re standing on is quicksand. And some of them are blithely capable of atrocities, from a brutal sexual assault to the murder of a pregnant Vietnamese peasant. What’s also rare is that this comic book universe is conjoined with a perversely warped version Richard Nixon’s America. The story takes place in an alternate version of American history, with a legion of real-life historical figures (from Pat Buchanan to Lee Iaccoca) showing up in cartoonish cameos that make the Watchmen seem real by comparison. But this is no Forrest Gump. There’s not a lot of room for cozy nostalgia in a movie where superhero vigilantes massacre peace protesters and America wins the Vietnam war. Continue…
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When you’re upstaged by a highway
By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 11:49 AM - 2 Comments
Joshua Jackson’s stardom takes a back seat in the most slavishly Canadian movie of all time
For Joshua Jackson, it was supposed to be a triumphant homecoming. After spending a dozen years in the U.S.—half of them coming of age with Katie Holmes and Michelle Williams in the cast of Dawson’s Creek—at the age of 30, this Vancouver-born actor was finally making his debut as a Canadian movie star in a Canadian movie. He had got time off from his Fox TV series, Fringe, and was flying from his home in New York to attend last fall’s premiere of One Week at the Toronto International Film Festival. Then he lost his passport; he had to cancel the trip. Making matters worse, his wife, actress Diane Kruger, had flown in ahead of him, and had to wait five hours to catch a flight back to New York. “I completely screwed the pooch,” Jackson told me sheepishly in a recent interview. “Rarely have I been so embarrassed.”
What’s ironic is that this émigré actor who somehow misplaced proof of his national identity is starring in what has to be the most slavishly Canadian movie of all time. He plays Ben, a frustrated Toronto teacher and novelist who learns he’s dying of cancer. Impulsively, he buys a vintage Norton motorcyle, ditches his brittle fiancée (Liane Balaban), and heads west. Shot along the Trans-Canada Highway, en route to Tofino, this bittersweet road movie turns into a virtual souvenir shop of Canadiana, from the roll-up-the-rim message on a Tim Hortons cup that lifts Ben’s spirits to the kitschy roadside monuments that serve as his stations of the cross—including the world’s biggest Muskoka chair, Inukshuk, hockey stick, paper clip, fire hydrant, nickel, teepee, dinosaur, goose and muskie.
