nixsight

Last Wednesday, I got my Seven Days of Films piece all written and ready, and was V.Excited Indeed. I wrote very insightful things about “Watchmen”, “Doomsday” and “Let The Right One In” – pithy, wise things that I hadn’t read anywhere else. And best of all, I did it all in a very short amount of time.

You may not have realised this, but I have a tendency to take a lot longer over these posts than makes reasonable sense, so that last point was a bit of a bonus.

So, then, I sent to Publish. And WordPress failed on me. And lost the post, too. Yes, I should have been writing locally before posting webbily, but WordPress has never done this before, so I got out of the habit. I feel so betrayed.

Anyway, so I’m going to try to remember what I wrote for this post, but if any of it seems naff, just assume that it was better the first time round!

Watchmen

So when they said that “Watchmen” was unfilmable, they were, apparently, utterly wrong. They must have been, because we were there, in the cinema, and it was all up there on the screen.

What they should have said is that “Watchmen”, without pretty heavy adaptation, wouldn’t make a very good film. Because it isn’t even remotely adapted here, and it sadly doesn’t make for very good film fare.

It’s almost the anti-comic book adaptation: despite early nerves brought on by worryingly buff and sculpted outfits and too-slick promotional material, the majority of online feedback from people who loved the source material about the movie is extremely positive, but people who weren’t familiar with the original have been left little more than nonplussed after the near three hour running time. The people I saw it with didn’t dislike the film, but didn’t really feel anything positive, either.

I’ll admit that I really enjoyed watching the film, though throughout I was hyper aware that it was because I was seeing scenes that I was already familiar with – down to the tiniest composition details – played out big-budget and beautiful on the screen. Trying to pull myself back to being someone who didn’t already know how everything was going to play out, I had to wonder what there was in the movie for people who didn’t already know the book intimately. For a brand-new viewer, the film is an emotion and dramatic vacuum, albeit a pretty one.

I think there are two key reasons for this, from which all further issues emanate:

Snyder and Hayter – and seriously, can you think of better names for a Director/Writer duo? – loved the book too much. They’ve made no effort to adapt the story for the screen, choosing instead simply to make concrete moments presented on the pages, even retaining the episodic structure of the book – though pointedly without giving the viewer any indication that that is what they are doing, leaving the narrative confused – which wouldn’t be a problem, except for the second point:

Alan Moore’s script isn’t fit for purpose.

That isn’t a criticism of Moore’s writing, or even his writing on “Watchmen”. In fact, quite the opposite… Moore – perhaps more than any other writer – understands, loves and has a natural affinity for the comic medium. He knows how it works on the page, and realises how people interact with it. And the original “Watchmen”, with all of Moore’s considerable consideration, was written for that medium.

Which isn’t to say that a straight port from comics to movies doesn’t sometimes work – Snyder’s own “300″ was proof that it can – or that it couldn’t work with “Watchmen” – because a fierce, brave adaptation can make any story work on screen.

But “300″, and “Sin City”, work as straight lifts because Frank Miller – as good a comic creator as he is – has always kind of written for the screen. You can see it as far back as his work on Daredevil. It makes for good, solid comics, but it doesn’t work for everything.

And “Watchmen” isn’t a brave adaptation. Well, it’s brave in that it doesn’t explain itself to the viewer, but in this case, and especially on a movie this big, it needed to.

The way people watch movies is very different from the way they read, and especially how they read comics. It isn’t that either one is more or less capable of delivering nuance. It’s entirely a sensual thing – a movie unfolds at it’s own pace, and the viewer can’t slow it down – it’s not an insult to the audience or medium that at times in a movie, it helps if the narrative tells you how you should feel, or what you should be thinking. Not all the time – “Collateral”, for example, shows how a film, paced right, can tell you a story with ambiguity in place, and let you feel your way – but a story as big as “Watchmen” has too many segues and threads to expect the viewer to unpick in the time they’ve got, especially when many of them are redundant. Especially when many of them were purposefully left shallow by Moore.

As well, Moore’s script understands that the reader brings themselves to the party in a comic, not just to add voice and dimension to the story and characters, but to apply intonation to the dialogue, or fill in the gaps. As a reader, you tend to take the leap that if someone has taken the time to write a description of a sequence of panels depicting a failed love scene, and someone else has taken the time to draw it, there’s something to that scene, and the reader goes looking for meaning, and later, when there’s a successful scene between the same two characters, the reader’s mind goes looking for a reason without even thinking.

In a movie, unless there’s nothing else going on, the same scenes play out like awkward and ultimately meaningless Hollywood romantic padding.

Even slight concessions to the audience might have helped with this particular problem – the meandering structure, that very deliberately gives focus over to one character or plot for each of twelve episodes amid the ongoing story, for example, could have been mitigated by chapter plates at the relevant points. It sounds tacky and post “Heroes”, but it’s how Moore and Gibbons designed the thing – the series is almost known for it’s formalism on that score – and if you’re not going to adapt, you might as well reflect fully.

And of course, there’s the question of relevance, and this is an area that the makers could have held the audience’s hand a little more on.

“Watchmen”, on release in the 80s, was a comic book set in an alternate version of the eighties. It was a deconstruction of the superhero in a medium, at a time, when superheroes were the dominant paradigm in that medium. In some ways, when Alan Moore wrote “Watchmen”, in the medium in which he was writing it, he was writing a story about everything.

But it was still a story set in that era, playing with those themes. Though nobody had ever written or seen anything quite like the book before, it’s readership was already in many ways primed and placed. The book – along with “The Dark Knight Returns”, but for very different reasons – brought many new, non-comic readers in, but for the most part they only had to take the one giant step – into superhero narratives. People reading the book out of it’s base era for the first time, for the most part at least were already confident with the concept of superheroes.

In movie form, in the noughties, the story is twice removed – there may have been a few superhero movie hits in the last couple of years, but still not enough of them that it isn’t still a novelty seeing them at the box-office anyway. And the very arch concept of having a power-mad Nixon still in power in an era where the US won Vietnam seems a bit redundant in a world where we’ve had both Reagan and Bush squared.

And though nobody beats Alan Moore’s writing, and few touch Dave Gibbon’s art, the fact is the book, for better or worse, completely changed the landscape of comics – at least, mainstream comics – in tandem with Miller’s work making the superhero a generally darker, grumpier concept. This makes “Watchmen” the book more striking historically than it is alongside some of it’s descendants. The film did nothing to address or reflect that.

It might sound, from all that, like I didn’t really like the film, but that’s not the case – I did, but the reasons why were more interesting to me than the actual film itself. I’ve already brought myself to the “Watchmen” story, so of course it was nice seeing it all in motion on the screen. But Hayter/Snyder should have made a movie of it, or they should have found the backing to do it as a high-profile mini-series – say, six or twelve episodes. It’s what they tried to do anyway.

Doomsday

What happened, I reckon, is Neil Marshall watched “28 Days Later“, and thought ‘Fuck, I can do better than that!’, and made “Doomsday”.

The key elements are still there; the infection, the wide open deserted spaces outside cities contrasted against toxic humanity within them. But in Marshall’s world, the insanity and cannibalism isn’t a symptom of the infection threatening Britain. Here, the idea that any society is only seven meals away from chaos applies – as long as the last three or four of those meals are HUMAN FLESH! For Marshall, it’s almost as if the “crazy” was always there, just waiting to come out the second society turned it’s back.

There are no difficult third-act pacing problems, because the pacing throughout is nuts. The subtle touch of “The Descent” is gone completely.

And unlike Alex Garland’s plot, the film makes the assertion that Scotland is a place to escape from, not to.

The film is heavily socially satirical – it’s no coincidence that the wall built by the government to keep the infection in Scotland follows the route of Hadrian’s Wall – but basically, it’s just a stupid and violent and vibrant love letter from the director to other post-apocalyptic visions like “Mad Max”, with nods to classics like “Aliens” and the like.

Rhona Mitra carries the protagonist role well – it’s perhaps inevitable that she gets compared to Kate Beckinsale in genre movie circles, but she carries her muscle more convincingly, and comes across as an understated hardcase, rather than a po-faced misery like Ms Beckinsale. Plus, it’s got Sean Pertwee losing his rag, Alexander Siddig being a bit underused, and motherfucking Bob Hoskins and Malcolm Mcdowell.

There’s a great turn by Craig Conway as the maniacal Sol, and, well, I couldn’t help noticing that decapitation and dismemberment effects have got really good, recently, haven’t they?

Twilight

If I preface this with the acknowledgement that I’m obviously not the target audience for this movie, you’ll get some sense of how this went, right?

That’s a bit of a duff assertion, actually. I’m actually a bit of a soft touch for teen-romances, coming of age stories, and movies that mix those things with genre tropes. So it sounds like what I’m saying is ‘I’m not a teenage girl’, but what I’m actually saying is ‘I’m not a naive girl-child being trained for passive aggressive behaviour that will make life hell for any friends and lovers I take in later life’.

The story, for those who don’t know, is that Bella Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, moves to a new town to live with her dad for a while, and falls into an awkward relationship with Edward Cullen, played by Robert Pattinson, of the mysterious local Cullens. Edward Cullen is different, because he and his entire family… ARE VAMPIRES! Kinda.

The best way to deal with this movie is probably in two parts – first, the technical aspects of the movie, then the story.

This isn’t a well made movie. We’ve seen movies made by directors fresh from music videos before, and one expects a level of slickness in those movies that sometimes overwhelms the will to tell a story. And there’s a visual brightness and smartness to this film that sometimes fools you into thinking you’re watching a visually interesting movie – presumably a side-effect of Catherine Hardwicke’s time as a production designer: there’s a bleached out look to most of the film that fits the themes of it, and are familiar from “Three Kings” and “Vanilla Sky”, two movies she worked on.

But it all falls apart with camera direction and editing that try to prompt emotion out of scenes that don’t seem to expect it, and by odd contrast put fast, swooping and arcing camera moves that sap pivotal scenes of any emotion that might be in them.

Not that that’s much of a concern, because despite the fact that this story is pretty much all about emotions and character interactions, someone along the production line – either at the casting, scripting, acting or direction point in the process – forgot to bring main protagonists that you might actually give a shit about to the table.

It’s hard to blame the two young actors tasked with the job – there are too many things already broken about the roles they’ve been brought in to play, which I’ll get on to – but when the director does such a decent, restrained job with the scenes involving family or friends – there’s nothing wrong with the interactions between Bella Swan’s small group of friends, for example, and there are some lovely quiet scenes with Billy Burke as her father. There’s a lot of fun had with the Cullen family, too, with Peter Facinelli doing a grand job as patriarch to the group – though when you first see the make-up job done on him to make him paler, it’s hard to imagine him really passing as human. There’s one particular sequence that was nicely put together, when the Cullens play baseball, that is totally a ‘because we can’ moment narratively, but is almost heartwarming.

By harsh contrast, there is no real on-screen chemistry between Stewart and Pattinson, or no written zing between their characters. In fact, alongside a script that sometimes works quite well during the normal, plot-inconsequential conversations, their scenes seem almost like non-sequitirs – their dialogues don’t scan, because the one person’s lines don’t seem responsive to the other’s. When this is where all of the heavy-lifting of the story is done, it’s fatal – the actors are called on to have emotional responses to words that don’t fit together, and an objective viewer just can’t care.

Effects-wise, the quiet moments where the incredible things that the Cullens can do are just incidental work a lot better than overdone flitting about as the film-makers try to wow the audience – ‘LOOK! LOOK! A person is doing things on the screen that you don’t see in real life!’ – because that kind of flexing has been redundant since “Spider-Man” in 2002. And it’s a personal thing, but that long-blur-lines-to-make-it-look-like-someone-is-moving-really-fast thing has always looked wrong – it’s a comic-book technique that doesn’t really translate to the moving image.

A lot of the textual things I didn’t like, though, may not strictly be the director’s fault – this is, after all, a very popular franchise, and there are probably lots of things from the novel that they were stuck with.

That there are story elements that aren’t really original isn’t problematic – ‘first day at a new school’ stories can still work pretty well, if there’s a solid creative mind behind them, as can the impossible love trope. And conflicted vampires are almost always fun.

The story of “Twilight”, though, manages to take these tropes, that should be ripe with emotion or fun or drama or meaning, and suck any danger or intrigue out of them. As I said before, there’s the logical blankness of the conversations between Bella and Edward, which when we see the two actors come alive in other scenes seems less like a flaw of performance, and more like an emotional blankness in the relationship in the source material. We are asked to believe in the love at first sight between these characters, but both are emotionally empty cyphers, and it isn’t as if they suddenly become vibrant passion generating machines when they’re together – they actually just become less lacklustre, and more irritable. It feels like love written by someone who only knows about it from reading about it, which might explain why these books have found the audience on the printed page that they have.

Further to that, there’s an oddness to the behaviour of Bella, who narrates segments of the movie as well. She seems tense and detached and unfriendly in almost any situation, but there’s a disjoin between how she acts, what triggers it, and how people respond to her – we see things from her point of view, but our impression of her is that she’s moody and prickly and feels like she doesn’t really fit, but everybody reacts to her as if she’s gorgeous, vibrant, talented and funny. There’s an argument to be made that the writers were trying to achieve an every-girl character, saturated in awkward teen-ness, but it doesn’t work; from the way Bella behaves and reacts to her classmates, we are constantly expecting things to get awkward or nasty, but instead, we’re left afterwards with the sense that she could be Prom Queen or class president if she wanted, though we’d never be quite sure why.

It feels like lonely-girl wish-fulfillment, is what it is. It’s the Anne Rice fan-fiction of someone who either struggled socially at school, or didn’t, but felt that teen-angst loneliness to an almost impossible-to-live-with degree, and never quite got over it. The character we’re expected to identify with the most in the story has love and friendship and popularity and the gorgeous boyfriend actively seeking her out, without her having to do anything – in fact, with her actively persisting in the sullen, introspective snobbishness that normally reduces people to a place at the table with the socially maladjusted goth kids.

There’s a key theme in quest or coming-of-age narratives, that you can see from the “Chronicles Of Narnia” through to the Harry Potter books and Arthurian legend: that the slightly odd kid, the weakling one, or the one with the imagination or the nerdy smarts, is actually destined – or even ‘Destined!’ – for greatness. Of course, there’s a wish-fulfillment to that, too – a lot of writers, after all, were that awkward kid, and it’s nice to think that there was some secret and important purpose that is the real reason why you’re set apart from other people. The thing is, in those stories, the hero actually delivers on that destiny – Harry Potter is actually a kick-ass, smart little fucker, Arthur was like the best king evar, and the annoying little girl was the only one brave enough and open-minded enough to rummage past the winter coats and go meet Aslan.

Bella doesn’t. Her defining characteristics are that her snobby internal life never overwhelms her desire to be polite and not cause a stir, and she never really moves past that. In fact, her main purpose in the story is to be fallen in love with, to be desired simply for what she is, rather than who, and to show signs of becoming a poster child for the worst excesses of the passive aggressive terrifying ex-girlfriend.

That seems like a leap, after talking for so long about how flat a character she is, but there are two telling scenes, which come out of nowhere in that way that scenes that seemed too important to the book to be left out of the film, but probably should have been, sometimes do.

The first is the scene where, with what passes for quiet dignity and self-sacrifice, Edward stands by Bella’s hospital bed and tells her that it is too dangerous for her to be around him any more. What follows is an excrutiating moment of pleading and panicking from Bella – which to be fair, Kristen Stewart totally nailed. It’s one of those moments when a problem or meaning in the writing suddenly becomes really obvious when acted out on screen – you can see how the scene must have played as touching and emotive on the page, the cries of one young lover at the prospect of losing the other.

But the final effect is quite different. For this brief moment, this girl, who is emotionally incapable – cut off – throughout the rest of the story, is a desperate, pathetic (in the most literal sense) and needy young woman in the middle of an irrational psychological event. It isn’t love she’s showing – but then I suppose that’s an easy conclusion for me to jump to, because their love hadn’t really been sold to me as a viewer – it’s fear of abandonment.

The other scene is in the final voice-over – Bella’s final words to the audience, and as such the final impression we take from the film. Bella and Edward are discussing a major decision that they have to make, and through the course of this discussion, Edward manages to convince her of his side, and a decision is made. However, in her voice-over immediately afterwards, she pretty much says, and I may be paraphrasing, ‘Well, that’s what he wants – is actually the only basis on which he’s willing to have this relationship – but I’ve made my decision, and I’m going to manipulate the situation until I get my way anyway’.

It isn’t a romantic or emotionally secure response, and because we’re expected to see Bella as the hero and the mouthpiece of the author, it just makes me wonder more as to the motivation behind the story.

Let The Right One In

“Let The Right One In”, on the other hand, is a Swedish movie dealing with very similar themes to “Twilight”, but despite dealing with much younger protagonists, and a wildly unfamiliar setting, everything about the film sits right.

Tomas Alfredson’s movie, based on John Aljvide Lindqvist’s novel and screenplay, tells the story of Oskar, a 12 year old boy who is ignored at home and bullied at school in the early eighties, and the awkward and touching relationship he strikes up with Eli, the odd young girl who lives in the flat next door.

It’s one of those beautifully pure little films that it feels almost wrong to say too much about – you’ll have noticed that I find it a lot easier to go on and on about films that I really didn’t like than about those I do – but it’s worth noting that it’s an evocatively filmed movie, taking full advantage of the urban landscape and cold-war aesthetic, and it’s often brutal and uncompromising as well. Where the love story at the center of “Twilight” seems juvenile at best, the feelings between this film’s protagonists are perfectly sold by the serene and sad performance by KÃ¥re Hedebrant as Oskar, and the truly feral, red in tooth and claw character which Lina Leandersson infuses Eli with.

The supporting cast are perfect, but don’t get a lot of screen time. As far as I can gather, much of the novel has been stripped back to the barest glimpses into other story branches, which was the right decision if the resulting film is anything to go by. But ultimately, the movie belongs to the child actors and the director, and it will be interesting to see what they go on to do.

There are also some scenes that I believe you just wouldn’t see in UK or US movies, and I’m curious to see how the proposed Hollywood remake deals with them. There are at least two moments between Hedebrant and Leandersson which are important to establish the feelings that they have for each other, but were a shock to the system – not because of what they showed, or how they were filmed, but because we just aren’t used to seeing pre-teens in scenes of a remotely sensuous nature. There’s a gut reaction we have to the idea of children as sensual creatures, brought on by years of social conditioning, that tells us that children are a lot more physically innocent than they probably really are in the wild, and with this film I was struck by how perfectly normal and unexceptional a scene that cuts against that assumption can be, if filmed without prejudice.

It’s a perfect film, with a perfect story, that gives a strong impression of a before and an after to it, without forcing the point with the audience, and Girl One and I loved it.