Watchmen (2009): it’s not only size that matters

We can get the review part over with pretty quickly: Watchmen is very big, not at all clever and pretty dire.

What it was was an excellent reminder of why we have so far preferred to blog about the glorious folly of the 1980s or the Swiss cheese cool of film noir.

Two films at the BFI Imax in as many months, but the contrast couldn’t have been more acute. I’d heard the mixed reviews of Watchmen, but I was banking on audiovisual muscle to make up the difference. An explosion or punch which fills up virtually your entire field of vision on a screen of roughly 540 square metres, and booms around your skull thanks to the 17,000 various speakers, would surely be such an assault on the senses that I wouldn’t notice it was a bit like all the other explosions or punches. I should have known better; I saw Beowulf here too, and that had been like watching someone else play a computer game. Blade Runner was a majestic experience for brain and eyes. Watchmen looked like what it was in this case: 540 square metres of crap.

I would like to see a few minutes of Watchmen re-cut. Nite Owl (had another masked superhero already taken Night Owl?) is really a man named Dan. He’s the slightly nerdy, gentle, goodhearted one. We hear that he suspects he disappointed his father by not following him into banking – he’s always been more into “birds and airplanes and mythology”. They’re nice hobbies, and he imparts the confidence with a winning, sheepish smile and duck of the head. Cut to an alley a bit later: Danny Nite Owl viciously cripples and murders goons that have attacked him. He could probably just have knocked them out, or got away, but he’s obviously more into Zack Snyder’s brand of mythology (the director is also responsible for 300). The violence is gleeful, utterly cartoonish, utterly gratuitous, like the film it mars.

Ahhhh and now, separated in the calendar but identical in location, I (comrade in watching and bloggering) too have slumped before the biggest screen in Britain and wondered at it’s content. Watchmen is in an awkward position having to follow Blade Runner as my last experience of the glorious IMAX, as has already been said. Intolerable choice of music jars throughout: it’s a who’s who of uber-tracks from the likes of Dylan and Hendrix. Quentin Tarantino’s greatest hatred is of films that try to steal the popularity, weight and resonance of music that already works in its own right and has nothing to do with the film. It’s like, he explains, watching a film and listening to the radio. Watch the sex scene set to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ and decide which you’d rather turn off.

If I am to find a positive, it is the first twenty minutes. It looks great with slow-mo photo-shoots of past glory days but even then it is confused about what it is, they try to explain past and present characters in a confusing blur of miscellaneous super-herodom. Rarely is it suggested where anyone came from, what shaped their characters. The film is mechanical but with an eye looking over it saying ‘it looks a bit mechanical lets try and do something slightly weird here and there to give us more credibility’… self-consciousness again I fear, the cancer of film.

rain rain yawn

Watchmen delivers rain in spades. Every outdoor opportunity is rained on… ever since the first dystopian movies of the ’80s rain has been used in this way, making night shots glisten, sheeting across bent characters in the gloom, and somehow Watchmen is the first to manage to make even this small detail seem obvious and predictable. Again, see painful contrast with Blade Runner.

These complaints are all details though. Are any of the relationships here even slightly credible? Woman snuggles up to a giant blue glowing man who has no interest in human life, and then runs off to Dan because… she doesn’t know anyone else? It’s pointless and mundane and the most irrelevant, loveless, chemistryless, love story ever depicted on the big screen.

The ending: good in that it meant the film had finished, but bad in all other respects. The concept of humanity needing a God to keep it from falling into self-destructive ruin could, if carefully made, be at least fairly thought-provoking… but not here. By the end the film feels as tired as it’s audience, it’s lost its way, it’s lost and subtlety and style it started out with and has resorted to massive CGI explosions ‘epic’ visuals.

Out there in the film world there exists a well-trodden path to mediocrity, and Watchmen plants its shiny shiny boots along this path with unforgivable precision

Blade Runner, Final Cut (1982): Part 1, Imax

The two of us who decided to watch the final cut of Blade Runner at BFI Imax in Waterloo are not humans to laugh in the face of the epic.

We knew the screen would be extremely large. The ambition behind Blade Runner is extremely large. This, the final cut, represents the climax of its director’s notoriously fastidious efforts to render the vision he had in his head. It was not an evening for half measures.

We met at 9 and went from a pub on to TGI Friday’s for dinner. Why? Why? A preposterous question. Strange, exciting foodstuffs of every gleam and gloss-laden wing and honey-coated flesh all in the contemptuous glow of thin neon and the thrall of multiple staff-led happy birthday singings by unhappy faces to complete strangers. All was well until, suddenly, disaster! It was 11.50! The film had started twenty minutes ago! No, it couldn’t be. It was! Speed and confusion reigned, the bill was dispatched, a taxi bundled into.

Then, a disaster that made its predecessor look like a blessing: the automatic doors wouldn’t open! The box office was deserted, no sign of human life. My spirit died, and I turned to go. But what was this? My companion had GRIPPED THE DOORS LIKE A MIGHTY APE AND PRISED THEM APART WITH HIS BARE HANDS! There was no time for jubilation: a security guard approached. Our hastily prepared lies melted away when he asked how he could help. We were in. Still a major hurdle ahead though – how would we find our seats in the darkened throng?

There it was, the screen that seemed too big to be real and a sea of feebly lit faces. Should we just go down to the front, we whispered to the usher? She wasn’t one to buck the procedure. She shone a torch on our tickets and then along a solid rank of people to where our seats were. She gestured us onwards, and so began the painful drama of ‘excuse me, sorry, can I get past’ and contortion and shuffling along the aisle… but we were being called back. We shuffled back to the usher who told us that further torch investigation had revealed the ugly truth: our seats were taken. More whispered discussion. We went down to the front. It did not escape me that we were very late, making noise, shining a torch around and generally creating a hideous distraction in a cinema full of the kind of people who were prepared to pay quite a lot of money for the privilege of seeing a revered sci-fi classic, in its long-awaited ultimate form, on the biggest screen Britain has ever known. A vision of rabid geeks and cinephiles setting upon us like a pack of wild dogs came to me…

Happily, it was only our minds that were torn apart, before being refashioned. I saw the film many years ago and failed to see what all the fuss was about, but I think I may just have been too young. Only one moment jarred, a bit of credibility crunching zooming in on a detail of an image. Apart from that, Ridley Scott does pretty well resisting the techno-porn-and-alien-monsters trap that has seduced many a sci-fi adventurer, and exploits what the genre has to offer. The meticulously created, absorbing weirdness of Blade Runner’s dystopic world repeatedly prompted a question that is always a good sign: ‘how did they do that?’. The climax proves how good ol’ Ridley’s judgement once was: the bag of tricks is put to one side in favour of Rutger Hauer’s rain-drenched face, whispering his deathless death speech:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain. Time… to die.”

We boggled at that 26-metre-by-20-metre face saying these things and rather than blurt out, ‘ABSURD!’, we were moved, actually moved by the huge pure unrelenting ’80s power of that gigantic Dutch face. We had forgotten there was disbelief to suspend.

To conclude, those closed automatic doors represent the barrier to what we must do to break through to wonder, the unknown and victory. You may lose heart, wishing to walk away aghast and defeated and inwardly cowed and unfairly broken. I beseech you, in the name of all that is good, for the sake of your compatriot next to you on the verge of despair themselves, pull those doors open. The future, projected to many times its normal size, awaits.

Out Of The Past (1947): a monologue

Kirk Douglas(?) and others

The intro

OK, small town, smirking henchman type, highly good-looking petrol pump attendant deaf-mute kid (soon, turns out to be Mitchum’s sidekick: clearly going to be central to the film).

Mitchum fishing, pretty blonde woman, he’s got a shady past which is threatening to suck him back in when the gangster asks him to come and see his boss. Lots of slick dialogue. I’m all over this.

Right, he used to be a detective in New York (explains the trenchcoat and expert cocky slant of trilby), actually called Jeff Markham, flashback surely…

The flashback

So now we’re in New York, there’s the smirker, there’s Mitchum and there’s head honcho. Fuck me, is that Kirk Douglas? It can’t be, these are the old days, older even than the old days when Kirk Douglas was around. Whoever he is, he’s very cheerful considering his girlfriend just shot him and skedaddled with $40,000. He pays Mitchum $10,000 to bring her back.

Mitchum goes to jazz bar, talks to girlfriend’s maid. How did he know she’d be in here? Girlfriend got vaccinated so he decides she’s gone to Mexico City. He goes, but she’s left her hotel. So he takes “the bus south, like she did” to Acapulco. “I knew she had to wind up here because if you want to go south, here’s where you get the boat. All I had to do was wait.” In a small cafe as it turns out, drinking.

If I was a private detective in an old film looking for someone who’d disappeared, I’d ask more questions about stuff. This guy will never find her. Oh, she’s walked into his cafe.

Time for a rethink. This is private detection at its finest. Forget logic, asking questions and looking things up. It’s those kind of ideas which are stopping me from being Robert Mitchum. Look at him – how many people can drawl with their eyes and their walk as well as their voice?

Absurd handsomeness going on all round

Back to the film. She’s sitting down, Mitchum’s getting up to go over… Hang on, why didn’t he finish his beer? It was half full! Never mind, he’s distracted. She is pretty, Not-Kirk-Douglas was right. Some sparky back and forth, she sort of invites him to a bar.

He goes to bar, and sticking to tactics that are clearly foolproof, sits there and drinks. She walks in. No prizes for guessing where this is headed.

Well, well, look who it is. Uncanny. Maybe that is Kirk Douglas. He grins too much though, and looks smaller than in Spartacus. His name isn’t on the front of the DVD box. Can’t be.

San Francisco now. Trouble, his old partner’s found them and he’s working for Not-Kirk now. A fight, impressively they manage to sock each other on the jaw about every second with a sound like a high five, a gunshot, Mitchum’s hair is messed up, she’s legged it, she did steal the money…

The present

So he’s finished telling story to blonde woman and they’ve arrived at Not-Kirk’s house. Talk of breakfast; Not-Kirk’s pretty rich, should be good. No, incredible, Mitchum gingerly sips at his coffee and then leaves! Have a fried egg man, a quick glass of juice!

Some of these one-liners are stretching it a bit. Still, that’s what a real star was back then: a guy who could read anything you asked him to and make it sound like his last dying imparting of wisdom. The words take a shortcut from your ears, past your brain and straight to the grin reflex. ‘Cool’, you evaluate. No wonder Not-Kirk can’t wipe the smile off his face.

Alright, getting a bit complicated now. Someone helped Not-Kirk dodge his income tax, but then he wanted more money than he was paid, but he could get some money for turning Not-Kirk in… Not-Kirk wants Mitchum to get some income tax records off him. Think that’s right. Still with it, no problem. Off to San Francisco again.

The collapse

A secretary, an attorney, drinks, lots of taxi journeys and different buildings, it’s all getting a bit confusing. That’s better, a corpse, you know where you are with a corpse. Is that the guy from before?

She’s not the secretary at all, she’s the girlfriend. But she’s pretending to be the secretary. What’s the girlfriend doing here? Ooh, cool line. An affidavit? Fisher? Now they’re kissing. I think everybody’s pretending, but maybe I’m just confused. Maybe it’s not that complicated, and I do know what’s going on.

Wait, who’s he? What did he just say?

Don't remember this bit at all

The petrol pumper! I was a little off on that one, haven’t seen him since the beginning. Ha! With a fishing rod!

Well strike a light, it is Kirk Douglas. I should’ve thought to check the back of the box earlier really. Looks a lot more like him now the grinning’s stopped.

Plane? Desert? How’s the poor pilot supposed to know where to go with those instructions?

I don’t think much of this love story. The blonde woman’s a bit boring and that sheriff goon keeps popping up. Doesn’t he realise that by saying things like “I’ve loved her ever since I fixed her rollerskates”, he painfully illustrates the contrast with a man who at times wears his trilby at a slant that seems vertical?

Another corpse, but I’ve stopped trusting them. Does he have to go with her? Time to face it, the intricacies of the plot have escaped me. Unless, the – oh, it’s finished. Quite an ending, and Mr Petrol Pump was pivotal after all. To paraphrase Mitchum/Bailey/Markham, was Out Of The Past a winner? I was finding out.

Excalibur (1981): time, truth and dragon’s breath

Award - defender man of filmic wonderness

Forged when the world was young, and bird and beast and flower were one with man, and death was but a dream..

It was 1981, and Excalibur’s hungry gleam was again hidden from the world. A man called John Boorman awoke at the dawn of a new decade, and saw two possible worlds – for there are many. His eye fell upon the fetid loping of bankers and politicians, on greed and shiny surfaces, on people chopping out lines of self-importance. The building of buildings, yet no sprite of stream, no dryad of deciduous forest. One ear quavered at the menacing wail of the synth, that seemed to tell of tribal viciousness in New York subway toilets, and of prisoners under assault by anarchists contemptuous even of death’s rule

And yet Boorman’s other eye watched his golden haired son gambol and laugh, free and full of the future. Could this not also be an age of huge helpless hopefulness massive positive wonderment…. unselfconsciousness a silent watchword? One ear might quaver, but the other revolved anti-clockwise when Nicol Williamson spoke. An idea ascended, yea, as if a lady’s fair hand propelled it aloft to break the surface of a lake upon which he goggled, and held it there in the sunshine. A merry band of modern knights. Lighting rigs instead of maces. Shiny shiny metal of shining metal. The eyes of time rolled up and back, cast forward and ceased to be. A hand reached forth and grasped destiny’s destination. Excalibur was once more in the hands of a king.

Today films are more real, grittier, darker, better looking… but they just aren’t honest. I don’t believe them. They’re fat and slick and full of the most over-studied acting and cinematography like a huge unkind man with an expert ironic haircut standing at a bar carefully not laughing at someone’s joke, even if he thinks it funny. Or maybe he’s so practised he doesn’t even think it is funny anymore. Orrrr he craftily overlaughs big lungfuls in posthuman mockery. I see this man everywhere, and with this man everywhere it stands to reason that some of him make the films we watch now.

The ’80s had its share of arrogants and terrible empty illusion pimps, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. But they were big, self-believing arrogants, believing in things they were doing, childish and foolish and brash and over the top and paranoid but pure in these things, and the so the films feel free and brave and not even brave but ignorant of the need for bravery, just people doing things they wanted to do, and lo, Excalibur, Flash Gordon, Back To The Future. They don’t feel like films made with worry for what the audience wants or expects or what awards are around. Please allow me to contradict myself: few ’80s films are among my favourites. They aren’t, when it really comes down to it, any good. But I am fonder of these films than any other. They are fun and honest and foolish and embarrassing, but sometimes the laughter at the man dressed in a codpiece stops because he has said something wise about the nature of time. Sometimes you can’t help but feel today that a modern film is so terrified of saying anything straight for fear of losing it’s cool image that it ends up hardly saying anything at all.

I will no longer be ashamed of my love for Excalibur and its brethren films, I love them for great and noble reasons and if you say otherwise I’ll adopt your physiognomy and make off with your wife! My defiance is thrilling and probably makes your wife want to make off with me anyway, but she and I know the truth:

‘The days of our kind are numberèd. The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent. It’s the way of things. Yes… it’s a time for men, and their ways. ‘

Reasons to be cheerful

• Dragon’s breath, Merlin and the dragon, is it magic, is it everything, is it England
• It’s so real…
• If in doubt, shout (letting volume and speed take the place of conveying anything)
• Jesus, the Dark Ages, the Holy Grail, myths. When did anything happen?
• Chases should be much slower and longer. Struggle through that mud, fall in that mud. The terror of the creep.
• How to kill someone covered in metal plates. When you gleam, you’ve made it. Beware the golden nipples.
• Dreams very important, the secrets of self and possibly of eternal life.
• Beauty, actual beauty.
• A crap film to watch, point at and laugh? No friends, no. Well a bit yes. But also poetry, wisdom, all of time, pockets of plenty and (this really can’t be stressed enough) Nicol Williamson giving possibly the most important vocal performance on record as Merlin.