In the Mood For Love

True visual splendor is surprisingly rare in the new millennium. Oh, high-resolution digital cameras and video have progressed to the point that even home movies can look "better" than the real world, and computer effects open infinite possibilities. But the majority of films that stake a claim to eye-popping visuals tend to overload with the digital stuff at the expense of looking sterile and safe, even in ostensibly tense action and suspense sequences. No, I'm talking about good, old-fashioned beauty, the kind that auteurs have been assembling long before George Lucas' brain tank at ILM signaled a new age for Hollywood. Directors such as Orson Welles, David Lean and Alfred Hitchcock (to say nothing of the precise craftsmanship of the French New Wave filmmakers) produced some of the most resplendent films ever made. Wong Kar-Wai, in contrast to the most commercially successful efforts of his contemporaries Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, very much looks to the old style of filmmaking for inspiration.

In the Mood For Love, Wong's 7th full-length picture, is one of the most meticulously crafted films I have ever seen, and a better argument for the importance of Hong Kong cinema than Lee's or even the early output of action legend John Woo. Its craftsmanship is even more impressive when you consider the director's improvisatory nature; indeed, he began with little more than actors Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, who slowly crafted their characters and a story, and somewhere along the way Wong set up a camera and documented the rest. But I invite everyone who watches this film to spot a moment of sloppy editing or plotless meandering.

Set in 1962 Hong Kong, In the Mood For Love charts the paths of a platonic romance between two neighbors. Leung plays Mr. Chow, a newspaper reporter, while Cheung is Su Li-zhien, an executive assistant. They both have the capital to live in far more comfortable conditions, but space is an issue in the rapidly overcrowding region (both Su and the friendly landlady, Mrs. Suen, are from Shanghai and speak that dialect as opposed to Cantonese, reflecting the influx of different cultures into the city). The two meet and gradually strike up a friendship, then they realize with horror that both of their spouses always seem to be missing at the same time.

The revelation of their spouses' infidelity brings the two closer. They meet more often, and not in romantic, glamorized locations. Very little time passes before both evidently fall in love, and Wong reflects this by turning all of the grotty urban sprawl that they traverse into something beautiful. It strikes me as Scorsese's New York, where such decay reflected the hopeless emotional turmoil of his leads. But Wong softens his city with bright colors and floral patterns; after all, even though our characters may be doomed, they're in love. But they do not allow themselves to consummate their relationship, saying it would make them no better than their spouses. Both agree to this out of...what? Social norms? Personal ethics? They clearly want the other to say "That's a load of rubbish. Why can't we be happy?" but they're both afraid to say it.

So the film becomes a paean to unrequited love, one in which the camera has to do all the work we expect the characters to do. That is to say, every pan, every tilt, every cut contains a sexual undertone. The two meet in claustrophobic locations, or the camera makes open spaces seem cramped, highlighting their proximity yet their perpetual uneasiness. Su's dresses become a sort of fetish, her bright floral outfits piercing the muted colors of the world around her and making her that much more attractive.

They even go a bit mental after the pressure builds a little too much. One scene in particular stands out: at the start of the scene, Su turns to Chow and bluntly asks "Do you have a mistress?" The conversation begins to play out until, at last, we discover that the two are engaged in a sort of game, role-playing their cheating significant others in order to get answers they're too cowardly and restrained to demand of the real person. Wong compared Tony Leung's character to Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo and, while Chow isn't nearly as intense or deranged, they both harbor an inner turmoil belied by their charming outer appearance. For the two to play out these sick fantasies to both string along their own flawed sense of moral duty and find hollow comfort shows just how deranged their spouses' affairs have made them and how Chow and Su are preventing themselves from moving on.

The ending brings an inevitable conclusion, but a surprising one, given the American mindset when it comes to romance. Love in Wong's world hearkens back to the unrequited poets composing sonnets for the women who barely acknowledged their existence if they noticed at all; in this world, relationships are imagined and eroticism and sex are reserved for fantasies with the one you adore. With gentle camera movements and elegant mise-en-scène, Wong Kar-Wai captures these feelings (and a great many more) in ways that appear simultaneously stylized and real. The deleted scenes on the Criterion DVD set up a meeting between the two past the film's official end, a brief moment that doesn't add or detract anything but somewhat undercuts the reality of it all. Many times love simply doesn't pan out, and that's the beautiful tragedy of it all.

Sicko

I'm sure any real film expert who stumbles upon this blog will have a coronary just reading these reviews with the knowledge that I aspire to be a critic, but if not this will surely send them over the deep end: Michael Moore is America's answer to Sergei Eisenstein. Hear me out. Eisenstein, the great editing pioneer and surely one of the five most important directors in the history of cinema, made a career out of propaganda films. Battleship Potemkin, Strike and October took real life events, twisted them to Hell and back, and presented them in rapid series of montages so effective that could turn an ardent Republican into a card-carrying Communist.

Moore works the same way (albeit with far less technical proficiency, of course): he takes a serious issue in America, gets interviews and connecting segments, promptly cuts them up to make him seem like the sole voice of sanity in a harsh conservative America, then puts it all in a blender and serves up revolution in a cup. Yes, Bowling For Columbine is so full of shit it not only insults the gun-owners it paints as bloodlust-driven animals but the victims of all the gun crimes the film backs, but didn't it make you hate Charlton Heston for about three seconds until your brain switched back on? So when Moore set his sights on the complex world of health insurance, I steered clear; Moore specializes in taking a moderately complex system and oversimplifying it. But insurance? You can't boil that down to a simple message without being condescending, so why bother?

Once again, however, I underestimated Moore's gift for rhetoric. Moore paints the American medical system as one run almost entirely by greed and inhumane business practices designed to ensure that even the insured in America cannot receive treatment. He finds parents forced to move in with their children because medical bills bankrupted them, people who have lost spouses and children, even 9/11 volunteer firemen not covered by government aid because they were not officially on state payroll. The stories are horrifying and enraging, and when a local clinic shows surveillance footage of a cab dumping out patients at USC's hospital because they couldn't keep payments up it's every bit as inflammatory as the Odessa Steps sequence.

What helps things a great deal is that, after making his films more about himself than his political topics pretty much since The Big One, Moore finally gets back to his Roger & Me method of using himself as an interviewer and someone who wants answers instead of trying to paint himself as some Average Joe stand-in and a wannabe Dylan without the music. Speaking of the latter, when Joan Baez showed up in Moore's disastrous Slacker Uprising -- yes, the same Joan Baez who made Bob Dylan, collaborated with Bob Dylan and even dated Bob Dylan -- called Moore the closest thing we have to a Dylan, I thought I'd never feel happiness again. But here, for a time at least, he stays mostly behind the camera or only on screen to ask questions as he should be.

Besides Cuba, Moore travels to our neighbors to the North as well as across the pond to England and to France to examine what happens when the commies get their socialist healthcare. Unsurprisingly, Moore leaves out any downsides and presents these countries as utopias so glorious I kept an eye out for the milk and honey. He interviews college-age kids and senior citizens who gleefully play along with Moore's Socratic irony, telling him that they don't suffer long waits in emergency rooms, nor do they ever have to pay more than a few dollars for care, and that's only when they need a boatload of medicine that runs in the hundreds in America. But Moore ignores the outrageous tax levels of these countries and the long waits for any treatment outside the E.R. Nevertheless, there's something truly wonderful about all the foreign doctors who honestly look like they can't fathom doing their job for the money or checking someone's insurance status before helping them; one British M.D. even puts to rest any fears that a doctor in such a program couldn't still be a millionaire, just not as big a one as an American.

In the final third, sadly, Moore can no longer restrain his primal need for self-promotion, and he leaps in front of the camera with vigor, dragging his favorite interviewees to Guantanamo Bay (among them some of the 9/11 volunteers) to demand they receive the same care afforded to the detainees. It's a moment of lunacy, then the gang somehow make their way out of U.S.-occupied Cuba into the country proper and receive care that may or may not be the norm. I admit, these ending moments are some of the most touching, with these doctors -- our enemy, supposedly -- giving medicine and surgeries to these poor Americans, and when a local fire department honors the 9/11 volunteers as brother firemen, I defy you not to well up.

Then Moore ruins it with one final bit: the webmaster of Moorewatch, a web site dedicated to monitoring the omissions and lies in Moore's films, announced he was shutting down the site because his wife contracted cancer and he could not afford the medical bills and the site payments. Moore admirably stands by the man's First Amendment rights, and sends the man a check for 12 grand so he can keep running the site. Unfortunately, he tells us all this while pointing out that he left his name off the check so as not to influence the man's future posts. Spot the flaw there, if you can. It's a moment of of shamelessness to cap off what had been Moore's most moving and affecting film since Roger & Me.

Nevertheless, it remains his best in years, precisely because its moments of self-centeredness are at last the exception and not the norm. It helps not to think of this -- or any of Moore's oeuvre, for that matter -- as documentaries but rather opinion pieces, and whether or not the socialized methods of other countries are the answer for the Unites States, Sicko does a magnificent job of pointing out glaring flaws in our system that must be addressed even if the model as a whole does not completely change. Sure, Moore never provoke any real change, but at least this time he provokes some thought.

Adventureland

Is there anything in this world duller than a summer job? At least the tedium of full-time employment brings with it the ever-present fear of termination, but every snot-nosed teen and twenty-something knows that, barring any major slip-ups, he’s stuck stocking shelves or flipping burgers at a time we’re all used to hanging out and watching movies. That boredom informs Superbad director Greg Mottola’s semi-autobiographical tale of his summer job, and the result is a surprisingly tender and subtly hilarious film.

We meet James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, looking like a more confident version of Michael Cera’s shy virgin), Mottola’s stand-in, freshly graduated from college and looking to attend Columbia University’s post-graduate school (after a summer tour through Europe, of course). But when his father loses his job, James must find himself a summer job to pay his way at Columbia. After hunting all over town for anything, James finally settles for Adventureland, a dingy amusement park run by a pair of mom-and-pop shysters (played by professional show-stealers Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig) who rig all the games and sell rotten corndogs to maximize their minimal profits.

James sits dead-eyed behind the various game booths, doing his best to make sure no-one wins the grand prize, the aptly titled Giant Ass Panda. He quickly befriends fellow games attendee Joel (Martin Starr), a pipe-smoking existentialist who could probably turn this job into a great novel if it didn’t corrode him so much, and contends with childhood friend Frigo, who punches poor James in a sensitive area every chance he gets.

But something must break the boredom, and of course nothing alleviates ennui like a woman. While the rest of the young employees lust after the gorgeous Lisa P., James falls for Em (Kristen Stewart), a timid girl who seems as virginal as James even though she’s more “experienced” (thankfully the virgin aspect isn’t overplayed as it is in every other geek comedy). Stewart plays a variation of what The Onion A.V Club terms the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl:” that is, a female character who serves to bring the male protagonist to some sort of epiphany and/or stable relationship at the expense of any characteristics of her own. Of course, as the star of Twilight, Stewart is no stranger to portraying a blank slate for others to project their desires upon, but at least she gets to do something here. Oh, and Ryan Reynolds shows up as a married maintenance man who is constantly at the park because, oh, you’ll probably figure it out before they tell you.

It’s all a recipe for cliché, yet the level of acting from everyone right down to the bit players and a script that offers moments of serious truths without forcing them lift the film into the levels of the better youth movies of recent years, the missing link between Superbad and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Oh it boasts one hell of a soundtrack: set in the late 80s, Adventureland is stuffed to the gills with great cuts from college rock staples like Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, The Cure, The Replacements, Hüsker Dü and a deliberately and hilariously overused “Rock Me Amadeus.” The great selection serves as proof positive that a well-chosen set of tunes can make a good movie even better and helped me wash the taste of Watchmen’s rank mishmash of ill-fitting tunes out of my mouth..

Greg Mottola couldn’t get this movie off the ground until he put Superbad on his resumé, yet its delayed production actually worked in its favor. Consider James’ situation then think about the current economy: it’s not exactly hard to draw parallels. So, timing-wise, think of Adventureland as a sort of reverse Confessions of a Shopaholic. But regardless of when it came out, Adventureland is a smart, sweet, very funny comedy that’s worth more than one viewing.

Sid & Nancy

The fact that Sid Vicious became the primary figurehead of the punk movement makes terrible sense: who better to represent the "No Future" Blank Generation than the man who went out even before punk reached the end of its century (which lasted less than half a decade)? It's only fair that Sid is remembered as a vague icon rather than as a person; after all, he was added to a band that was all-image in the first place -- at the expense of Glen Matlock, the band's songwriter and singular source of actual talent, no less -- and strummed his bass in a manner that made the Ramones look like Emerson, Lake & Palmer in comparison.

But Sid owes his lasting infamy, more than the spiked hair or the Nazi fashion or anything else, to his relationship with Nancy Spungen. Separate they were immature junkies who couldn't possibly understand the path they were taking, but together? Oh dear, together the two formed one of the most toxic and mutually parasitic relationships ever committed to the hallowed slime of tabloid immortality. The two met, fell in love, and then fell harder into the heroin habit to end all heroin habits. Sid's perpetual state of No Feeling played no small part in the dissolution of the Sex Pistols, led to his inability to find steady work after the Pistols folded (though, in fairness, his utter lack of any appreciable talent helped, too), and resulted in a relationship full of physical abuse that culminated in Sid stabbing Nancy in a drug haze and later dying of an overdose.

The problem with tabloids is -- and I hope I'm not saying anything revelatory here -- that they practically congeal from a steaming pile of crap. They pander to what sells, and what sells is controversy, which in turn thrives in a world without context. When a rag stumbles upon the truth or delves deeper into its subjects you can rest assured you're simply witnessing the law of averages play out and not the start of anything approaching real journalism.

Director Alex Cox, unfortunately, apparently never learned this when he set out to make a film documenting the most torrid love affair in rock history. John Lydon, better known by his stagename Rotten, went out of his way to let everyone know that Cox did not consult him, any other Sex Pistol, nor anyone remotely connected to the real Sid. Heck, the closest he came was collaborating with ex-Clash frontman Joe Strummer on the soundtrack. And frankly, it shows.

My problem with the vast majority of biopics, both good and bad, is their over-reliance on the "highlights reel" as I call it; that is to say, even the quieter films essentially stick to the various stages of an artist's life that serve as either turning points or are simply interesting. It's even worse when video footage of such moments exists, because then the director will, nine times out of ten, simply reshoot the footage as closely to the original as possible with his actors to pay lip service to the people who'd get the myth.

Cox's film spends so much time doing this it's a wonder we get any insight into Sid and Nancy at all. There's the River Thames boat incident, the infamous Bill Grundy interview, that final Pistols concert in San Francisco not even a year after their first album hit shelves, Sid going through withdrawals in a cell at Riker's Island. It's all there, and it's all completely unexplained to anyone who might have just stumbled upon this film. Yes, 99% of the audience will at least have a cursory knowledge of the Pistols', but how many know real Pistols lore? Unless British schools are teaching punk history alongside maths and literature, a great many people won't get a great many references.

However, the film does have a saving grace, and his name is Gary Oldman. Because the script deals only with the public perception of Sid Vicious, Oldman plays up to the image we got of Sid, yet he adds enough of a human touch to make Sid into the tragic figure he always was. We see him as a fundamentally good manchild who simply couldn't cope witht he fame he tried desperately to attain. Likewise, Chloe Webb shines as Spungen, a much tougher role to pull off as she never had the cult of personality Sid continues to enjoy decades after his death. Indeed, she seems little more than a screeching harpy most of the time, but when Webb quiet delivers some of the film's most telling lines it's plain that the shrillness is a by-product of her highs. The two actors put in some downright award-worthy work here, and they help smooth over some o the weaknesses of the script.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of the rest of the actors. Andrew Schofield was nearly 30 when the film was made, but he looks closer to the modern, 50-year-old John Lydon rather than the brash bastard child of the 70s. Oldman was the same age as his co-star (and a good 6-7 years older than Vicious when he died), but look how right and youthful he looks for the role. Schofield's Rotten also possesses none of the wit and intelligence of the real thing, instead walking around the film with such a slack-jawed lack of understanding that the drug-induced catatonia of Vicious and Spungen seems energetic in comparison. Likewise, David Hayman's Malcolm McLaren is little more than parody. These two figures obviously appear more at the start of the film, in Sid's Pistols days, and it's a blessing when they drop out near the end of the film.

Ironically, that final act, in which Sid and Nancy sink into their own little world of depressing, spiraling inevitability, is when the film truly comes alive. As the two retreat from everybody except the odd dealer, Oldman and Webb grasp you by the head and force you to watch the horror unfold in dreadful anxiety. When they set their hotel room in Chelsea on fire and simply sit and watch it burn, too stoned to even register the danger as the flames surround them, you completely buy these two characters. And when Sid awakens from his heroin blackout to discover he stabbed and killed the love of his life, the crushed look on Oldman's catatonic face is genuinely heartbreaking.

These final moments -- including an ending hallucination where Sid reunites with a virginal and clean Nancy -- redeem the near atrocity that is the first 2/3, but of course they don't elevate the film into classic status. Sid & Nancy does offer a harrowing look at the effects of drug usage, the hopelessness of two people barely in their 20s headed towards a grisly death. But I still can't help but feel somewhat disappointed by the film, including the good parts: this could have been a wonderful opportunity to peel back the mythos and examine the person under the image, rather than shuffling all that into the last 35 minutes. I can't really fault a film for not catering to my wants, but I would have liked to see a film about Simon John Ritchie. But Cox gave us a film about Sid Vicious, instead.

I Love You, Man

Jason Segel established himself as the dark horse of the Apatow crew last year with the incredible Forgetting Sarah Marshall, far and away the best of the slew of Apatow-produced (and occasionally directed) films to come from the thinktank of former Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared staff and stars. Now he almost single-handed buoys the best of the lesser Apatow works; you know, the ones with which Apatow has barely more than a passing involvement.

The plot of I Love You, Man is both brilliance in simplicity and a big risk: at the start of the film, Peter (Paul Rudd) proposes to his love Zooey (Rashida Jones) and she says yes. But their post-engagement high does not last, as wedding preparations reveal that Peter has no steady male friends to invite to the wedding. Fearing the bridesmaids will have nothing to do but sit around awkwardly, Peter attempts to drum up some guy friends. Rudd plays Peter as a man who wants to be relaxed and cool but spends too much time trying; the actor's got a lot of charm, and it's impressive to see him twist it into awkward humor.

The result is a surprisingly sly take on the average romantic comedy. Peter uses all of the avenues we usually see characters using to find a mate: he looks around the gym and the office, to no avail. His gay brother (Andy Samberg), who chases straight men for the challenge, sets him up with a "man-date" that goes predictably yet hilariously awry. There's also the requisite gross-out gag, one that's been done to death but with a slight tweak that made the whole thing just a tad unexpected. All of this goes on for a 20-minute or so span that starts to overstay its welcome, and the film threatens to drag right out of the gate.

Then Sydney (Segel) shows up. As much the physical embodiment of what every laid-back dude wants to do but abstains from either because of fears of repercussions or a nasty case of maturity. He doesn't clean up after his dog, takes seemingly indefinite lunch breaks, and just generally speaks in the sort of aphorisms that sound really wise when you're young and cocksure but tend to lose their sheen when you actually think about them. Peter and Sydney bond over a mutual love of the Canadian prog rock band Rush, unquestionably the single best group to provide the heart of a platonic romantic comedy between two geeks.

From here the film gleefully follows every rom-com trope in the book and turns it on its side: Peter and Sydney fall into such a deep bro-love which incurs Zooey's jealousy, leading to the inevitable Big Misunderstanding that leaves all parties scattered with an uncertain-but-not-really predicament to be solved in the third act. But if it plays out in predictable tedium, that's only because it's sitting right next to you in the audience laughing at itself.

There's a fine line between comedy gold and abysmal failure when it comes to over-the-top exaggeration; for example, Step Brothers tried to filter the coming-of-age story through the lens of two middle-aged man-children, and the result was downright awful. I Love You, Man succeeds because its exaggerations are tempered by some of the sweetest and most genuine moments you'll find in a comedy these days: Peter's scenes with Zooey never once feel contrived and manage to convey Peter's dopey charm without seeming kitschy (mainly thanks to Paul Rudd's natural charisma). The three leads are helped along by a terrific supporting cast (including the aforementioned Samberg, professional straight-man J.K. Simmons as Peter's dad and Jon Favreau and Jaime Pressley as a perennially-bickering couple), who only make a great film even funnier. I Love You, Man is far from perfect, but it's one of the funnier films in recent memory, and it's worth the price of admission if for no other reason than to see Paul Rudd and Jason Segel jam to old Rush tunes.

Shoah

For the entire first hour of Claude Lanzmann's massive 9-1/2 hour documentary Shoah, I disliked it. I expected a comprehensive Holocaust documentary, and here was this Frenchman going around interviewing survivors and witnesses but never really getting to the bottom of anything. And he never tried to establish a timeline, neglecting to show any old footage or list off important dates.

Then I sat back and truly paid attention: Shoah is less a documentary than an oral history, an attempt not to pry explanations out of its subjects but merely to hear their side of the story. His questions are not irrelevant but masterfully paced in order to coax more important answers out of the interviewees. For example, he does not ask the Polish residents of an apartment complex how they felt about moving into the homes of evicted Jews; instead, he asks "Who lived in this house before you?" Even when he goes for more obvious and loaded questions like "Do you miss the Jews?" he skirts being didactic and manipulative.

In between interviews, his camera ambles around various locations relevant to the Holocaust: train tracks that carried Jews out to their new homes in the ghetto and eventually the concentration camps, rivers and woods where people staged resistances or tried to escape and, of course, the dilapidated camps themselves. Now overrun with weeds and other plant growth, these sites of unimaginable horror are slowly being reclaimed into the Earth, giving off the unsettling suggestion that the atrocities that happened there are all just a part of life on this planet. Earth has seen far worse destruction, and continued to survive.

The people interviewed are split into three unofficial categories: the survivors, who managed to make it out of the death camps; the bystanders, people -- chiefly Germans and Poles -- who at least knew that Jews had been moved into ghettos even if they knew nothing about the camps; and perpetrators, ex-Nazis filmed (often unwittingly) offering accounts of their roles in all this. One of the few who stands outside these groups is a Holocaust historian, who offers the only overarching context of the film when he discusses the various atrocities committed by all major civilizations on Earth. What set the Nazis apart, he solemnly intones, was the Final Solution. "Then they became innovators."

What struck me rather early on about Lanzmann was a certain cruelty towards his subjects. One of the ex-Nazis he interviews actually refuses to be questioned, but relents under the condition that he is not filmed. Lanzmann agrees, then sets up a hidden camera and we see his crew taping from a van outside. At one point the man even asks for reassurance that he is not being taped, and Lanzmann gives it to him. "Nazis don't deserve privacy," the director says later, but that's a cop-out. Nevertheless, I reluctantly agree with his decision: these people need to be documented before they die, and their feelings on the matter cannot interfere with history.

These interviews reveal the careful structure of the Final Solution. Responsibilty was so spread across that no one person ever felt like he was really doing anything. According to these Nazis, they never knew the extent of what they were doing and they were in the damn camps! In order to preserve morale by preventing soldiers from facing the full truth of what they were doing, Hitler and the Nazi leaders turned death into an assembly line. In a sick way, it's kind of brilliant, even though I highly doubted that these Nazis didn't really know what was going on.

But anyone who was willing to side with Lanzmann tactics out of lingering hatred of Nazis (can't blame 'em) might have a tough time aquitting his treatment of some of the survivors. At one stage he interviews a barber who was assigned to cut the hair of those on the way to the gas chambers, and he recounts seeing a fellow barber forced to cut the hair of his own wife and daughter. The man breaks down in tears and begs Lanzmann to let him stop, but the director presses. "Please. We must go on," he gently urges the poor sod, and he's right; just as the stories of the Nazis must be heard whether they will it or not, so too must the testimony of the survivors, even if it means forcing these people to relive unimaginable horror.

Shoah is a one-of-a-kind achievement, a piece of cinema so important it almost sands outside of film itself; ratings, list rankings, it's all pointless. Lanzmann is one of the few people smart enough to realize that any attempt to explain or understand Hitler and his cronies will go nowhere, as there's no psychologist on Earth who could offer any definite pathogen for Hitler's actions. It's easy going into this to expect a 9-1/2 film to be about as comprehensive a study on the event as you could get, but Shoah defies all expectations, and instead paints a much more terrifying, revealing portrait of the tragedy than any study of the actual events could ever create.

Watchmen

With 2007’s 300, Zack Snyder proved himself to be the fanboy’s dream: a director who would take a source and transpose it almost literally to the screen. He didn’t particularly care if the result was a good movie, but then neither do the hardcore fans. If you ask the average superfan whether he’d like to see a director take creative liberties with source material to make a unique product or just copy and paste the panels from a comic or the prose from a novel and he respond the latter 9 times out of 10.

Snyder heard the lament of the fanboy, and went about making what must surely be the closest adaptation of a comic book ever made. There are Shakespeare films that don’t come this close to the source material. Entire pages of the comic come to life as Snyder’s effects team and designers perfectly recreate settings, costumes, and even characters (nearly all of the actors look eerily like Dave Gibbons’ sketched heroes). The opening credits alone will fill the average fan with indescribable glee (or maybe that’s just me). Visually, this is one of the most beautiful, eye-popping movies ever made.

It is also one of the most poorly-paced, poorly-acted and poorly-directed films of recent years. Alan Moore’s dystopic, alternate universe 1985 gave us a world full of vigilantes, a king Nixon, and a superhero who sent that version of Earth off course from our own. Yet it was all scarily plausible, and remains so long after the end of the Soviet Union and the fear of nuclear holocaust, all because Moore filled the world with so many understated themes -- ranging from social commentary to an indictment of comics themselves – that it continues to fascinate readers decades later.

Snyder, to his credit, understands these themes, certainly more than the Wachowski brothers, who turned V For Vendetta from a slice of anarchist rebellion into a “Vote Democrat” PSA. But these themes are promptly glossed over as if they were part of the special effects. For all the political fears Moore conjured, the message at the heart of Watchmen is quite simple: anyone who would put on a gaudy spandex costume and dole out their notion of ‘justice’ is at the very least unbalanced. But this theme doesn’t hold much weight when married to Snyder’s love of ultra-violence. The biggest changes from the book – apart from the ending which still leads to the same result as the original one – are scenes of added gore that add nothing but shock value.

Snyder focuses so much on this gore and on the visuals as a whole that the lines (haphazardly lifted from the novel without care) come off as laughable and the pacing will put 75% of the audience to sleep. The actors look the part, but only Jeffery Dean Morgan and Jackie Earle Haley pull off their roles. Haley in particular proves that if Clint Eastwood really did retire from acting he should hire the man as his proxy, as he commands the role of Rorshach with a gravel voice and a steely exterior that belies the character’s madness.

But not even Haley can breathe life into this bloated, self-absorbed affair. Snyder crafted what basically amounts to 2-1/2 hours of exposition punctuated by action sequences that revel in the violence the comic condemned. He turned a complex character study and political statement into facile psychoanalysis of characters in whom he never bothers to invest. And he put together what may just be the worst soundtrack of all time; I’ve watched anywhere between 1600-2000 movies, and I’ve never heard a soundtrack more intrusive and ill-chosen as this.

When you review a movie, you have to know who the audience for the film will be. You don’t necessarily have to care, but you should know what that group will make of the film. I have no clue who the audience for Watchmen is. Those who haven’t read the book are going to feel mightily letdown by an ad campaign that suggested an action romp and not a political thriller, while despite Snyder’s direct translations a great many of the diehards will find some omissions outrageous. That kind of reverence deifies what it seeks to make entertaining, crafting a shrine, a museum reconstruction, instead of a film. When all the dust settles, Watchmen’s legacy will be the proof that “looking like the book” ultimately means little when it comes to entertainment value.