Half-Masked

This is a Robot Chicken sketch just waiting to happen. And I hope it does.

(I know it’s crap, but at least I’m able to draw anything this week, which is why there was no comic last week. Stupid fingers weren’t cooperating on any artistic ventures for a little while there.)

I have told this story in several places already, blogs of others I frequent, but I find it is strangely therapeutic, so I shall share it here as well. I am going to talk about my experience watching the movie “Watchmen”.

For roughly 2 hours and 20 minutes, the same thought keeps coming back into my head: “I think this might be better than The Dark Knight!” And I am one of many who thinks The Dark Knight is one of the better films of this decade, in addition to being quite possibly the best comic book adaptation ever. I can’t speak for everyone, and I’ve never read the graphic novel(although I’ve been aware of the characters and spoilers for a month or two). I had low expectations due to the silly fun of the trailers, and the choice of director. As a colleague online wrote to me: “How do you go from a crappy Dawn of the Dead remake and 300 to ‘visionary director‘?”

By transmuting the most popular work of Alan Moore, that’s how. And by sticking to its merciless appeal, and never allowing the fancy cgi or camera-work to strip out its diseased soul. What I remember of those 2 hours and 20 minutes was much better than I was ever expecting. I was expecting a popcorn flick. I was surprised to see a harsh, paranoid-schizophrenic tale of scathing genius and madness rolled into one. All coiled up in the looming fear of total nuclear annihilation. I don’t know how much of the writing is Moore’s, David Hayter’s or Alex Tse’s, but the weird universe these Watchmen inhabit strikes a fascinating tone, alien yet familiar.

And that ending! Not many movies(let alone comic-book movies) have the courage and audacity to leave us like that, but I’m always glad when a film doesn’t give us an automated, manufactured happy ending. What we have here is not necessarily a downer, but rather a thinker. This is complex stuff, but I never thought about getting lost, because the “goal” of every other superhero movie doesn’t apply here. The rails lead only to oblivion here.

Like The Dark Knight, it shows us the failure of good men. By the end, we are all challenged to like these characters in spite of their terrible nature, to hate them in spite of their heroics, and ultimately to understand that their superpowers do not make them impervious or immune to weakness. They are faced with some seriously tough moral decisions. Here, even the gods are powerless. The hype I observed(but not necessarily participated in) leading up to the premiere was justly rewarded. This is a hell of a movie.

Then someone in the audience farted.

Aside from the film, it was whisper-quiet. The teenagers in the row had stopped texting and chatting to each other long before, completely devoting their attention to a series of pictures and sounds which hooked each and every one of us, and engaged them to keep their mouths shut until the credits. And not 5 minutes from those credits, during a scene we are supposed to take seriously and solemnly, some butthole(literally) ruins the mood.

It wasn’t particularly loud. Nor was it silent, but it was deadly to my conscious perception of the valid work in front of my eyes. It was something that could have been hidden from public awareness, but it clearly was not, as everyone including myself suffered from it through spontaneous, joined laughter. I can’t help it if I’m immature! As far as I can tell, it was not any revelation by these aging superheroes, but rather that childish moment that I associate as the sick punchline of this movie. What troubles me is I did not want to laugh at that point. Maybe earlier, when the dwarf from Seinfeld appears in the prison scenes. But not now, not right at the end! If it had happened earlier, then we still would have noticed it, but the rest of the film could carry us away from that and let us focus on something more substantial.

Had this person “vented” themselves during the credits, no one would have heard it over the applause. All they had to do was be considerate enough of those around them to wait another 5 minutes. Now that is the last impression I was left with. Not: “Wow, what a terrific film!“, but instead: “Goddamnit.”

I’ve admitted to liking the film, but that is after much inward searching. The incident clouds my memory to finer points of that evening. That one sound very nearly trumpeted in the massacre of my enjoyment with this movie. It’s hard even to focus on something more -specific-, a line of dialouge or a camera shot that I liked, because my mind is chained to that one moment where all of Allan Moore’s and Zack Snyder’s hard work was butchered by the inconsiderate nature of one anonymous audience member.

I can only recall broad strokes. Through the haze, I know I liked the music choices, but I’ve already forgotten most of the songs in the soundtrack. I know I didn’t like the sex-scenes, but enjoyed their “climaxes”. I know Rorscach is one of the coolest fuckers ever put to the silver screen, even if he only appears to me as a growling Question right now. I know Dr. Manhattan is interesting, and reading Roger Ebert’s analysis on him and quantum physics helps elucidate some murkier reactions still floating around in my skull. But my desire and ability to pinpoint what I liked outside of vague terms seems muted. In fact, this has soured my outlook on seeing movies in a theatre, as a shared experience with fellow movie-goers that I had to seek guidance from Mr. Ebert through e-mail. How does one recover faith in going to the movies with other human beings?

I like going to movie theatres. I do, I really do. There is a sense of awe I feel, at being surrounded and involved into art and entertainment like that that I just can’t get from a television set. It is a grand, powerful, sound-blasting time, where even lesser movies seem to find some strange appeal. Sometimes you get a good audience that increases the experience just a bit. But I’m not willing to have possibly great movies murdered by these same people I have to share a theatre with.

This should be one of my favourite movies, and now I fear I will never fully appreciate it. The stink-cloud hangs over, haunting this movie for me. A ghost-fart. Which isn’t nearly as effective as Heath Ledger’s performance haunting The Dark Knight.

Yes, it’s funny. But goddamnit, I don’t want it to be! That’s what I find maddening about it. Not even that it’s not humorous to me, but that it detracts and blinds me to what I did like about Watchmen. A sound in the dark is all it took to take 2 and a half hours of cinematic brilliance out back and shoot it in the mouth.

If I ever find the sphincter that did this to me, it’s going to have a close encounter with one of my boots.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 6th, 2009 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.