Like the gazillion other people who apparently went to see The Dark Knight this past weekend, I saw the newly-released Watchmen trailer.

The first thing I will say is that it is a very well-done trailer. The second thing I will say is that, as mentioned in nearly every bit of press regarding the film over the last year, director Zack Snyder seems to have succeeded in his effort to slavishly reproduce the visuals of the graphic novel.

If you detect in those comments some degree of skepticism on my part, you would be correct.

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I was really, really excited about this movie. Unfortunately, it was rather disappointing.

The main problem is that Guillermo del Toro, while quite good at creating stunningly original visuals and an interesting core story, is not all that great at putting together a coherent film. In this regard, he’s much like Terry Gilliam—his movies look great and have an interesting premise, but fall apart when it comes to plot mechanics and details.

There is way too much going on in Hellboy 2, and as a result, none of the individual threads are handled particularly well. Fights go on too long, the plot doesn’t make sense, character development is scattershot, and there are too many moments in the film that seem tacked on or poorly chosen.

More specific complaints below the fold…

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Just in case I wasn’t already sure that the new M. Night Shyamalan joint The Happening was going to to completely suck, I ran across this tidbit on the interwebs this morning:

But asked what specific religious faith inspired The Happening, Shyamalan went super vague. He said he drew on “the Native American culture and relationship with nature, the relationship with the sky, the earth, the rock the bear.” He also claimed that cast he Mark Wahlberg because of his strong faith in Jesus. But Wahlberg’s religious faith ended up causing a ton of reshoots. Whenever Shyamalan would ask Wahlberg what he was thinking about, and Wahlberg replied, “Jesus,” Shyamalan would make him reshoot the scene in question. (Until he was no longer thinking about Jesus?)

It’s a total mystery to me why studios and investors keep giving this guy money to make films.

I finally got around to watching Cloverfield a week or two ago.

Based on most of the reviews I read when the movie came out, I was expecting to hate it. Annoying, throw-away characters, nausea-inducing camerwork, gimmicky premise—the general consensus seemed to be that the marketing hype far outpaced the filmmaking.

As it turned out, I thought Cloverfield was pretty good. The monster was relatively original, and I appreciated the fact that the filmmakers resisted the urge to show off the fruits of their CGI investment in an obvious way. As for the characters, I was surprised to find myself actually caring about them. Aside from the suspension of disbelief necessary regarding the fact that anyone would actually spend much time filming what was happening while running from a 40-story monster, I found the characters’ attitudes towards one another and the camera to be rather appealing.

As for the camera work itself, the shaky-cam that so many reviewers complained about didn’t bother me. While that may be related to the fact that I was watching the movie on a laptop (as opposed to a big screen), I saw Blair Witch Project in the theater and that didn’t bother me either.

My one complaint about the movie is something that I had been thinking about before seeing Cloverfield, and that is that, once again, I’m tired of watching New York City get destroyed. This film, like War of the Worlds used enough 9/11-style visual cues that it seemed rather exploitative.

Obviously, the horror movies of any particular time period will reflect the fears of the day. Paranoia about communist infiltration in the 1950′s brought us Invasion of the Body Snatchers and countless other alien invasion movies, social turmoil in the Sixties manifested in Rosemary’s Baby, and the sexual and social repression of the 1980′s was reflected in an endless string of unstoppable killers hunting down promiscuous teens. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the touchstones of contemporary horror would be some unstoppable force coming to our shores and wrecking our cities. However, it seems a bit like cheating to lift the ash clouds, fluttering paper, and falling buildings directly out of 9/11 news coverage to achieve one’s desired effect.

Having said that, though, I’d still recommend Cloverfield if you’re looking for an entertaining and relatively novel approach to the giant monster genre.

Someday, in some movie, when the hackers “breach the system”, it will not magically cause everyone’s monitors to simultaneously lose power.

This is my dream.

Help me to make it real.

An addendum: In the same movie, government agencies will not mount monitors fifty feet up on the wall, where no one can actually see any of the data displayed on said monitors.

There are many complaints I could make about this movie, not the least of which is that large segments of the plot make little sense. Why would you store something that needs to be kept frozen in the middle of a desert? Why would you take an object which is incredibly dangerous and over which a huge and destructive battle might be fought into the middle of a densely populated area? Why give something that must be taken somewhere as quickly as possible lest the entire world be destroyed to the slowest person around?

All of these gaps in logic are related to major elements of the plot, but each can be countered by the same simple argument:

GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS.

Given that it A) is based on an 80′s cartoon that was based on a line of toys, and B) is directed by Michael Bay, I went into Transformers not expecting much. While I wouldn’t call it a great movie, it ended up being surprisingly entertaining, mostly due to the aforementioned giant fighting robots.

The cast is uniformly good, often making the best out of what tends to be some pretty hokey dialog. Particularly good were Jon Voigt as the ass-kicking Secretary of Defense and a surprise and somewhat crazed appearance by John Turturro.

The effects are nothing short of spectacular, although it’s difficult to imagine that they would look as good on a TV screen. I was a bit surprised (but not in a bad way) that there wasn’t more screen time devoted to the Transformers themselves. While you get to see plenty of them, in many of the scenes the focus is on the humans, with robots flying around in the background or on the edges of the screen. An interesting choice, I thought, given the title of the film. Once I was out of the theater, I found myself wondering whether this choice might have been the result of the difficulty of actually rendering 20-foot-tall characters full of gears and moving metal parts, but while watching the movie, it made for a surprisingly engaging experience.

The one actual gripe I have about Transformers is that with the exception of one character (who does, admittedly, kick some serious ass), all of the black characters are clowns who constantly yell insults at their grandmothers. Oh, and in Mr. Bay’s world, the single Latino character is repeatedly told to speak English.

Again, though, it’s probably best not to think too deeply on this one (see above, re: GIANT FIGHTING ROBOTS).

While at the theater this past weekend to see Ocean’s 13 (which wasn’t bad), I was pretty excited to see a poster in the “Coming Soon” section for 30 Days of Night.

Originally a graphic novel written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith, 30 Days is a vampire tale set in Barrow, Alaska. The title refers to the fact that nights in Barrow last for thirty days, as the town is above the Arctic Circle. A large group of vampires is drawn to the town for precisely this reason, and as one might expect, all sorts of mayhem ensues.

I’m interested to see how the film translates the visuals of the comic to the big screen. The movie versions of Sin City and 300 have demonstrated that it is possible to duplicate the look of the comic quite literally. These two films have also demonstrated that, sadly, such a duplication does not necessarily make for a good film.

Templesmith’s art (an example of which I’ve included in this post) is a large part of what makes 30 Days of Night such a great book. The smudgy, murky panels and roughly drawn characters go a long way toward building the oppressive, desperate situation facing the residents of Barrow.

However, most of the artwork is so expressionistic in nature that a Sin City-style ultra-faithful adaptation would be impossible. Given the supreme crappiness of that film, though, I think that’s probably a good thing.

Anyway, it seems the trailer is available for viewing on movie’s official website (warning: the trailer starts playing automatically), and looks pretty good. It should be noted, however, that I have been fooled by cool-looking trailers before. In the meantime, I’ll keep reading Templesmith’s new solo book, Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse, which I have been enjoying immensely.

I finally got around to seeing Neil Marshall’s The Descent recently. The plot of this film is fairly simple—a group of college friends reunite to go spelunking and run into… unpleasantness.

At its core, a good horror movie usually begins with a patently ludicrous premise, but connects with some deep-seated fear in the viewer. In the process, we forget that the story itself is completely ridiculous, that there really aren’t shape-shifting monsters from space, or cannibalistic families of chainsaw-wielding maniacs, or whatever.

The fear here is that of being trapped in small spaces underground. There’s also “being chased by something,” but if I go to much further into that, it will spoil the fun. Marshall’s previous outing, Dog Soldiers, struck the same sort of tone with its group of British soldiers besieged by werewolves. That movie was good, but The Descent trims much of the cruft and end up being a much tighter affair.

Another novel (and refreshing) aspect of this movie is that the characters are all women, and not the shrieking, fall down and twist and ankle stereotype that usually populates the horror genre. At the same time, neither do all of them easily fall into the Ellen Ripley ass-kicking bucket.

It’s reassuring to see a good, scary horror movie amidst the sea of over-the-top, exploitative torture-fest movies currently overrunning theaters. If you’re in the market for a good scare but would prefer your hard-earned money does not go to further the misbegotten careers of Eli Roth and the morons behind the apparently endless Saw franchise, then The Descent is definitely worth checking out.

I watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth last night. It wasn’t half bad.

Actually, it was pretty good.

For the first ten minutes, I was concerned that the film would focus too much on Gore himself, rather than on his subject matter. Fortunately, such did not turn out to be the case. The tale of Gore’s own involvement in environmental issues is interweaved throughout his presentation, but it works fairly well. It provides a narrative thread to what otherwise would have been a guy standing in front of an audience giving a lecture (albeit an interesting lecture). More importantly, seeing Gore’s background gives the viewer an idea of why he’s doing what he’s doing—this isn’t just some guy in a suit scolding us.

As for the film’s message… that is somewhat difficult for me to judge. I find the scientific evidence for human-influenced global warming to be pretty incontrovertible, so Gore is preaching to the choir here. Will this movie change the minds of so-called global warming “skeptics”? Probably not—they are already willfully ignoring and/or misinterpreting an ever-growing mountain of evidence.

However, I suspect most people in the U.S. are either unaware of the issue, or confused by the conflicting stories presented by the media. These are the people to whom Gore is really speaking here. As he states repeatedly throughout the film, global warming is an issue that is easy to ignore because of its gradual nature (relative to our lifespans). It is also an issue that is confusing because of the efforts of a vocal minority intent on creating the illusion of scientific controversy.

The goal of An Inconvenient Truth, then, is to show the generally reasonable but mostly uninformed public that global warming is a very real crisis that needs to be dealt with. Additionally, it wants to demonstrate that the cause is not hopeless, that there are steps we can take that will make a difference.

How successful the film is on either of these counts obviously depends on how many people see it. For those that do, Gore’s case is well-presented and fairly strong, and he presents a clear set of actions that viewers can take. Too often with activist films, 95% of the running time is spent describing the direness of the current situation, whatever it might be, and the 5% that is left for constructive suggestions about how to change the situation seems tacked-on (Robert Greenwald’s documentaries are classic examples of this problem).

While Gore pulls no punches about the direness of the situation, he makes it very clear that there is hope. “There are many people,” he says, “who go from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually solving the problem.” The list of actions Gore offers are aimed squarely at U.S. environmental policy and the American public, and they range from the somewhat abstract (“Make your town greener”) to the very concrete (“Buy energy-efficient appliances”).

The film is also surprisingly entertaining. While Gore is still a bit of a stiff, he is an engaging speaker, managing to pull off jokes that don’t seem canned and connecting to his audience. This change from his traditional public is most likely due to the absence of political handlers and subject matter about which he cares deeply.

“Where was this Al Gore during the election,” I asked at one point while watching the movie.

Then someone reminded me. “He was winning it.”

I have been thinking about Oliver Stone’s JFK, which I recently re-watched for the first time since seeing it in the theater.

You may recall that at the time the film originally came out, there was a large fooferah surrounding the accuracy of the story. Stone took a lot of criticism for his rather formalist approach to history—here he was, purporting to recreate a well-known and high-profile part of our nation’s history, and yet he was clearly playing fast and loose with the facts. As a film maker, doesn’t he owe his audience more than a pile of vaguely-referenced conspiracy theory stitched together with fancy editing and a manipulative score?

At the time, the answer was “No,” and it still is.

By the time JFK came out, Oliver Stone was well-known as an activist director with a clearly defined point of view. Anyone going into the theater expecting an objective historical account is a fool. Frankly, anyone expecting to get any kind of objective historical account of the Kennedy assassination is going to be disappointed. This event has become such a jumbled mess of history, conspiracy, and rumor that untangling it is a lost cause.

Stone’s intentions, however, are beside the point. While JFK can be evaluated for its historical accuracy (dicey at best), it is first and foremost a film. As such, it’s pretty damn good. The extended “Director’s Cut” version that is now available on DVD is overly long, but otherwise, the performances, plotting, editing, and direction are excellent (I’m grading Costner on a curve here). Holding a director responsible for the foolish interpretations made by the viewers of the work leads down a fairly slippery road. There are obviously some gray areas when it comes to historical dramas such as this one, but the ambiguousness of Stone’s subject matter here grants him a fair amount of latitude.

On a somewhat more contemporary note, JFK also got me to thinking about the historical period surrounding the film as compared to the one we find ourselves in now.

In a relatively brief amount of time, we had the assassinations of a sitting President, major civil rights leaders (MLK and Malcolm X), and the likely Democratic nominee for President (RFK). Meanwhile, the country was mired in a war that ended up killing almost 60,000 U.S. troops, involved a nationwide military draft, and generated huge domestic protests. Finally, we rounded things out with the resignation of a President facing impeachment. All the while, the Soviets had a metric assload of live nukes pointed at us.

And yet, we are to believe that we currently face the worst threat the country has ever seen.