I know, I know, I haven’t posted in awhile. I should warn you people before you start making movies: this crap makes you kind of a monster. I don’t have time for this “internet” thing much lately, I’m scampering around like a madman, trying to get this dinky little five minute piece off the ground. Imagine a theatrical release.
So “Slumdog Millionaire” pretty much destroyed the Oscars, didn’t it? Fair enough, I suppose, it was a great movie. I’m still not pleased with how “The Dark Knight” was treated, but in all fairness, most of the Best Picture nominees were really outstanding motion pictures, so it really comes down to a matter of opinion. I won’t lie to you, though: I’m not sure “Milk” or “Frost/Nixon” were totally innocent of simply being the right genre for Academy recognition. Both are great films, but little that they do hasn’t been done before. Tell me the truth, Dear Reader, how many David versus Goliath political thrillers can you name? Probably at least a couple. How about inspiriational biopics about a flawed but charismatic social revolutionary? Yup, you can probably count those out on two hands.
And there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, since both movies are so well done, but we have to consider that there are other films, also crafted expertly, which defy the genre landscape around them. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” both rightly nominated, almost defy a categorization; they are simply stories. “The Dark Knight” is, as you know, a revolutionary piece of cinema, one that has already had a potent effect on what’s expected from comic book superheroes. No one before Chris Nolan has ever ended a comic book movie with the hero absorbing the sins of a friend onto himself and escaping into the night a disgrace, the love of his life murdered, his enemy alive and well. No one has had the bad guy win so many fights. No one has turned an action sequence into an argument about human nature. No one has unblinkingly depicted their superhero with shades of gray, willing to cross ethical lines, going too far in the name of something good.
My worry is, the Academy is no longer an effective barometer of the cinematic landscape. Too often, we are forced to look back and laugh at their ineptitutde, their inability to see the movies that actually mattered. These people handed statues to art house dramas while “Star Wars” and Martin Scorsese flew right over the plate, no one swinging at them. I think they should seriously consider how stupid it makes them look (particularly because they are definitely not stupid) to insist on genre favoritism. Did you know that “Rebecca” is the only Alfred Hitchcock film to win Best Picture? The year he made “Rear Window,” which was not nominated, the statue went to “On the Waterfront.” Not the worst decision ever, but I think any honest appraisal of enduring legacy must favor Alfred over Elia Kazan. What were the other nominees that year? Go look them up, because I guarantee that you probably haven’t seen or heard of any of them. Same thing for “Psycho,” which any idiot can tell you is one of the most important movies ever made. You don’t even want to know how many Oscars Stanley Kubrick, who is repeatedly called the greatest director of all time, was given. I’ll give you a hint: less than one.
These are not little oversights, people, and neither was “The Dark Knight.”
But let’s be fair, there’s also been plenty of good work on the Academy’s part as well. I think they sensed that “Juno,” while great, was a little bit more of a fad than anything else, so they went with “No Country for Old Men,” which has already shown signs of enduring. I’m really impressed that they nominated Sigourney Weaver for her stunning work in “Aliens,” and I’m willing to allow that she didn’t win in light of the fact that she was up against Marlee Matlin (even though I’d still give it to her). Many kudos for acknowledging Kevin Kline’s brilliance in “A Fish Called Wanda” as well; that kind of deft perceptiveness, the ability to see the really great work that all the accolades sometimes miss, is sorely lacking elsewhere.
Anyway, enough about that, let’s talk about something else.
The “Watchmen” movie is coming soon, and I’m very excited. I’ve watched some of the clips they’ve released online, though, and I must say I have some dire concerns. My main worry is that director Zack Snyder is going to stay too close to the dialogue from the graphic novel. This is a mistake. Dialogue is elastic, it needs to grow and shape itself based on its surroundings, and stuffing canned conversations into these actors’ mouths would be the wrong move. The best way to adapt a story from one medium to the next is to be honest about what needs to change. Yes, the dialogue in “Watchmen” the novel works, but “Watchmen” the movie must be constructed as a separate entity, a creature with its own needs. If I were Zack, I would take as little as I possibly could from the worn pages of that seminal comic, because that stuff just wasn’t written to be spoken aloud. Alan Moore does not attempt a naturalistic manner in any of his characters, and I fear that transcribing him into a literal cinematic narrative will create ridiculousness. Roger Ebert coined the idea of “clang” moments (or something like that), which are things that noisily yank a viewer out of the narrative stream. Few things “clang” more audibly than actors who are forced to garble some three syllable word that they know their character probably wouldn’t say.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d adhere to the plot of “Watchmen” very closely, I’d even try to maintain the order of the scenes. But not the dialogue, let that crap air out, write it from scratch. Your audience will thank you, and your movie will feel fresh and distinct. The highest honor you can do your source material is to give it new life in a different medium. Ask Stanley Kubrick, who had more success adapting literature into film than almost anyone. Here’s a guy who successfully translated “A Clockwork Orange” and “The Shining” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” into film classics. How did he do it? He let them change. Good stories will want to change as they find new homes, they need to.
I’m worried that Snyder, who is probably still riding the wave of Robert Rodriguez’s canonical adaptation of “Sin City,” is going to balk at this advice on a philosophical level. He’s going to ignore me, not because my points are invalid, but because his value system demands a reverent, slavish recreation. He got where he is because he appeased the internet forums, the rabid fanboys, and they insist upon the strictest kind of rigor; it’s the same human psychology that led zealous Jews to memorize whole chunks of the Torah thousands of years ago. For his movie’s sake, I hope I’m wrong. You don’t want to waste two years of your life creating a movie that just makes everyone read the comic book. If “Watchmen” is a classic, and it is, then it deserves a loyal but unique incarnation in a new dimension.
That’s my opinion on that.
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