Watchmen, again

[rm]

So we saw Watchmen last night as Patty hadn't yet, and I have to say, that eventhough the pacing problems were a lot more evident to me, I loved it more this second time around, perhaps mostly because it is the alternate universe story of my childhood.

From the earrings to the songs to Sally Jupiter indicting me with her own nostalgia ("the past just keeps getting brighter and brighter") I was entranced.

I also got to spend this viewing on the details, and they are pretty amazing. From photos on people's walls to advertisements in the landscape to the newspaper headlines strewn about. The set design is full of funny, nasty love.

What I was also struck by was how much the film has to say about body image. It's not just that Dan and Laurie only get it on for each other once they are in costume. Oh no. It's that all the masked heroes are wearing these deeply sculpted clothing items and without them -- well they are just like you and I. Adrian is too skinny without his fucking shoulder pads. The Commedian and Dan only seems like that's all muscle because of the shape of those suits. Even Sally Jupiter, as she unlaces from her outfit... even Laurie. It's about 800 times subtler than it should be, but this is America and Hollywood after all. But it's there, intentionally or no. And as someone who views all clothing as costume, and creates illusion in my own flesh with how I dress, it was mesmerizing. There are a bazillion verbal references to it in the script too, but you don't see them on a first viewing -- you've got too much else to do.

Finally, the performances. The woman playing Laurie thankfully doesn't have much heavy lifting to do (and maybe it's the script that makes it seem like she's a mediocre actress and not her, but eh), but the other performances? The details in them? If you see it a second time never watch Veidt's body language, just watch his eyes: the puzzlement, the lonliness, an almost childlike confusion are pretty much constant. It's an amazing performance.

The woman playing Sally Jupiter is also amazing. The rape scene? When juxtaposed with Laurie and Dan fighting that gang? I've never seen such a complex attempt to make the audience really, really uncomfortable (and I suspect the audience largely didn't bother to be), and it's all on the shoulders of the actress playing Sally pretty much. Great stuff.

The Comedian's performance almost isn't worth mention, not because it isn't great, but because it's a fucking sledgehammer of perfection. No nuance there. Nor should there be.

Dr. Manhattan. Wow. Billy Crudup's voiceover center of the film life out of order thing, is still a masterful short film in and of itself. It's hard as fuck to carry a voiceover that goes on and on like. Testament to writing and editing, yes, but also the tiny, tiny nuance in his performance, largely vocal. It, like the opening credit sequence, are two amazing self-contained films within the film.

Rorsharch. The performance is just amazing. And I felt more sympathy for him on the second go 'round. But I am sort of amazed by the fandom love. I love anti-heroes. But to me, he's just broken. Not tragically, but frighteningly. That the performance (that many of these performances) won't win awards is sad. It's amazing, internally scary-seeming work.

~

I hated not being an adult in the 80s. Hated it. The world was terrifying and alive and full or parties as we all fall down.

I read party magazines like Details, got to see the beautiful people at 2am at the Odeon when my parents would take me there for dinner when I'd awake in thunderstorms terrified of wind and bombs, and eventually snuck out to my own nightlife adventures: AREA and MARS

I remember a pudgy dude in a suit, -- so blond, so white, so entitled in his body language -- said he was in med school, said he was 27, and I was fifteen maybe, and he grabbed onto my wrist hard enough to break in a bathroom, trying to put my hand on his cock and sweet talking me, as if the 'nicety' of mere cajoling wasn't total bullshit with a grip like that. I was scared shitless, but I was boney and too flexy, and I twisted my wrist out of his grasp and shouted "ha!" in his face before I ran.

So I watch Laurie and Dan and Adrian and Eddie, and I think, god, I was supposed to be out there among them. Not a costumed hero, but someone happy to see their celebrity in the endless night that was New York in the 80s. But they didn't actually happen, here, in this universe, and I was a child. Twelve-years-old. Thirteen. But I had this whole adult life in my head and in my lies by '85.

Like Sally says, the past keeps getting brighter and brighter. I love this movie. I love visiting my 80s that never were with these terrible, terrible people (they are terrible people in a terrible world. The movie almost makes you forget it).

It still seems ridiculous to me, despite being a pure incident of math, that I never got to go to Studio 54.

Comments

[thatwordgrrl.livejournal.com]

Absolutely the best casting choice was Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach.

Interestingly, broken as he is, he's also the most self-honest about who he is and what he does.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

The '80s were a bad decade for me. I've alluded to family problems before; well, those problems consumed the '80s for me. I graduated from high school in 1981, but didn't graduate college until '90. So I find now that I tend to repress the '80s, because that's where I lost my twenties. Really where I lost my early adulthood. I might as well have been 13 still, day dreaming the life I should have been having instead of the one I had.

I just looked up at your text, and it threw me a little. Laurie is my first name, and it's a rare enough name that it startles me when I see someone else with it. It's a part of the disconnect that Watchmen makes me feel.

And yes, Rohrshach is so terribly, terrifyingly broken.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

That aerial shot near the end, of Veidt standing in the snow and ruins, is the loneliest shot ever. I feel like the movie should have ended there. It said everything about everything.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yes. Obviously, I have some partiality to "New York has a giant hole in it featuring the fucked up part of a subway tube with the Twin Towers looming in the background., but it's self-indulgence. Artistically speaking you're right (and a film like this really shouldn't have a denoument). Also, what happens to Veidt next? What is his story in the new world?

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I felt totally weirded out when The Ritz moved uptown and tookover the space that Studio 54 had been in. It felt totally haunted.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think I even remember an article around that time to that effect. Really hazy though. I saw some of my first concerts at the old Ritz and saw many, many at the new.

There was even one year when the Summer Ball of the Junior League Judior Advisory Committee thing was at the Ritz, but I can't remember if it was the new Ritz or the old Ritz.

[coriander.livejournal.com]

I so agree...

I really feel like the actors were so well chosen... and even Laurie - I think she was meant to be kind of "protected" and still naive, even with her Hollywood perfection.

We saw the movie twice, back to back. The second time was like a gift. There was so much to see. I think I'd like to see it again a couple more times to absorb it all.

I also feel largely the same way about the 80s... I'm jealous that you were so close to the action! *grins* The fact that there are new shows coming out that depict the 80s brings up so much excitement in me. It was more than the music, the scene, the fashion... I long to have been more conscious of the world at that time.

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

One thing I loved about Watchmen was that I didn't really recognize any of the actors. I wasn't thinking "Oh look, it's Movie Star #4", which can be distracting. Afterwards, I looked things up and saw that in fact I've seen the Rorschach actor in a couple of other things, and that Dr Manhattan was Billy Crudup. But during the movie I was totally "There's Rorschach!" (There's a fandom love? Really?)

Adrian Veidt was wonderful. He was so utterly put together, with his Egyptian art and his action figures. And his computer had a folder called BOYS. And Dr Manhattan was just breathtaking, drifting farther and farther away (even literally, to Mars).

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

You decided that you would be an adult in the eighties.

My 80s that were were a terrible time, with terrible people who decided that they were not going to be adults, and that no one was going to make them. Or else.

Thank you for sharing. :)

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

The 1980's WERE CRAP!!

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

Me too. I liked Muppet Babies best.
she would rather I have compassion than intelligence
Did you end up having to choose?

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...you know, I haven't seen Watchmen yet. Do you suppose it will still be in theaters on Sunday or so?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I would say you've probably got a week to catch it before it's gone. And it's worth seeing on the big screen.

[genmaicha.livejournal.com]

I've seen it twice myself, and you're right, there's so much you see in a second viewing. Like Adrian's accent, gone to American ears when he's speaking to reporters or businessmen, but there it is when he's speaking to his "friends." Some people said his accent was all over, but they didn't notice the context of when it appeared and disappeared.

Billy Crudup did an amazing job as Dr. Manhattan. His voice is just perfect. It's familiar but unworldly. It's human-like but inhuman. The softness is what does me in.

Rorschach was amazing and uncompromising. I do have a fair amount of something for him...I'm not sure what it is. Not really admiration, not exactly respect, not even really a liking. An acknowledgement, I guess? He's frightening but still amazing.

Sally Jupiter...with her, I just kept focusing on how right her voice was. How rich and thick it got when she was reminiscing at her photograph.

And the Comedian was just... It was painful and real.

It's an amazing movie in so many ways. The little things, like "99 Luftballons" playing, or the muzak of the elevator chiming "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," and the sweeping largeness of "All Along the Watchtower." The entire opening sequence to "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and then the cliches-that-worked for "The Sound of Silence" and "Hallelujah." (A lot of people have said they hated the latter, that it detracted, it was hokey. I thought that was the point, to paint it in ridiculousness. That it didn't work before, but they need this vigilantism to find that spark, and how messed up that is.) Hell, even the trailer's music choice was amazing and so suitable.

Just such an amazingly well-crafted movie. Not perfect, but with so much to offer.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I've said it elsewhere, but when I was 19, I was fucking a 40-year-old who was an insane, sexy, not appropriate, con-man/entrepreneur Vietnam vet. The Comedian is sort of the character I don't know how to talk about, because it seems insane to talk about the truth in that, except, there it was. True true true.

And yes, Adrian's accent. A real treat. I have different public and private voices; many people do -- accents having cultural as well as national origins (i.e., my private school accent and things like "gay accents" or the speech patterns/pronunciations used within ethnic communities as opposed to without).

All the actors really learned to love these characters. It's so clear in the performances.

And yeah, I too was mad for the music.

[woogledesigns.livejournal.com]

I have always thought that greater intelligence produces a broader capacity for compassion, as we expand our brains to see things from other perspectives.

Who knows why they 'cut you loose' maybe they didn't know any other way. Do you think your parents would have been happier with a smarter son than a smarter daughter?

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I am somewhat nostalgic for the culture, much of which I missed at the time, having buried myself firmly in the Romantic Era, but I can actually see more videos on Youtube than I knew existed at the time.

The politics I do not miss AT ALL. I was briefly part of the local Jackson campaign in the late 80s and worked against homophobic ballot measures.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

(To clarify: I do not miss the Reagan-era politics, Bush-lite. I don't regret my political activism.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Billy Crudup has done some amazing voicework. He's Ashitaka, the male lead, in Princess Mononoke and is one of the best of the cast.

[shipchan.livejournal.com]

The details in that movie were so great. I think it was one of the main reasons I liked it so much. Some of those scenes look exactly like the panels in the comic.

I sort of want to show the picture of chibi you to everyone. You look so different from what I would have imagined. Way younger then the 13 year olds I knew.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

There is also a relation between intelligence and courage. It is easier for the smart to be brave.
And it is easier for the brave to be kind.

Yet I think that kindness more likely to produce courage, than courage is to produce kindness.

And intelligence is of little help unless one is not afraid to look at things that one does not want to see.

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

Ach, you're lucky, Watchmen's been gone from my local for weeks. I only got to see it five times too D:

It's interesting you noted the physicality of the actors. I noticed too, especially that Adrian's costume is the only one that really calls attention to muscles, when he's the slightest out of all of them. It's now my personal canon that Adrian designed his costume deliberately to disguise his own lack of physical bulk.

Apparently, Matthew Goode is really tall, which is something I didn't notice in Adrian. Interesting that they would choose not to emphasise that when they could have used it (unless I was just being blind/busy staring at his ass, which is entirely possible).