Returning again to the topic of the “Watchmen” movie, I saw it again today and was less impressed than the first go-round. Not a good sign. The graphic novel is practically built on repeat customers, but I feel the drastic weekend fall-off the film experienced last weekend suggests something my experience today corroborates: this thing doesn’t age, or improve with closer examination. That’s disappointing, and an obvious sign that they missed something. I will leap to the defense, however, of British thesp Matthew Goode, who plays Ozymandias. Many people have derided his performance, but I though it was mesmerizing, exactly the kind of acting I see in my mind when I write things. I love film acting, it’s so intimate that you can turn the smallest flickers into gigantic expressions.
Unrelated to this, I also watched “P2″ last night on Netflix Instant Streaming. It’s a fairly low-radar horror flick that came out a couple of years ago and mostly passed by unnoticed. I have no major problem with that, although I will admit it’s not really half-bad. It’s about a career-oriented young woman who gets stuck in a parking garage on Christmas Eve with a psychopathic parking attendant. The good news here is that the antagonist is an actual character, we get a real sense of his motives, and they have little to do with actually harming our protagonist, which makes the story more unique than the trailers wanted you to believe. Also in the positives is Wes Bentley as the attendant, who does a fantastic job creating layers in his character, especially during the first two acts; as the movie runs out of clever things to say, he is reduced to frothing at the mouth, but this is far from Wes’ fault. Nice job, dude. Some props also to Rachel Nichols, who does the best she can with an absolutely nothing character. I’m getting to that.
As for the not-so-great column, the movie’s not scary enough, but for a very noble reason. Steering mostly clear of standard slasher fare, “P2″ wants to be more of a psychological thing, and I’m totally down for that, but the sense of threat is not well-sustained. Also problematic is that the bad guy is a far more interesting character than our “hero,” who is mostly predictable and dull, save for a nice spark of righteous fury at the very end. If I had written this movie, I seriously doubt I would have told it from Nichols’ character’s point of view, since she’s really kind of an object to Thomas (the bad guy), and there’s not much to do with her. Several characters receive a healthy dose of Thomas’ wrath for doing things he perceives as slights to Angela (the hero), and I might have centered the story more on them, since they have much more to fear, and their perspective on these events would be totally unique to the horror genre so far. Also, there’s a grisly death in the beginning that does not work. I mean they take the gore way over the top for this thing, and all I could think about was corn syrup and set dressing (and may I remind you I’m a total wimp). It wasn’t even really shocking, it was just pointless; it felt like grabbing at straws.
Movie gore is interesting. Correctly employed, it’s a powerful tool, but it takes only the most adroit filmmaker to understand when this is. Rob Zombie movies come up with more ways to slaughter imaginary people than you can possibly imagine, but no one remembers them, no one is haunted by them, because they’re hatchet jobs. Take, on the other hand, the shower scene in “Psycho.” Here is a scene with maybe five seconds of on-screen gore that is still buried in the American psyche to this day. Alfred Hitchcock, because he was Alfred Hitchcock, knew that you needed to see blood, you needed to feel the reality of the murder, and he didn’t shy away from this. However, he also understood that his job was not to depict the murder anatomically, but to give your mind the ingredients to create it yourself, which is always infinitely more shocking. So, he gave us only glimpses of blood, only a hint of the knife going in and coming out, only a few moments of Janet Leigh’s scream. He gave his audience the raw materials of fear, and only the bare minimum of what we needed. Anything more was not serving the story. Anything more was pointless. This is what offends me so much about this torture porn stuff: not only is it sick and disgusting, it’s not even good filmmaking.
Ah, but I’m off on a rant again. Let’s talk about something else.
I’m just about to go watch the Series Premier of that new show “Kings,” which I’ve heard is a modern re-telling of the Biblical book of the same name. I have really, really high hopes for its success, as that is a genius idea. I’m not reading any reviews, I don’t want to be biased at all, let’s just…see where it goes…
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