The strangest film I’ve seen in some time is an experimental docu-drama from Thailand called Mysterious Object at Noon, directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai architect who has an MFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (which, when you think about it, is a great town for an architect to go to in order to study film). It’s not a docu-drama in the American sense of the word, but rather a film that documents a narrative, the tale of a home study teacher and her disabled student. How it does this is what is so unusual. Working for over three years with an all-volunteer cast & crew – which also means an ever-changing cast & crew – Weerasethakul employed the surrealist game of the Exquisite Corpse, which, as described by one web site devoted to this practice,

was played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution

Now imagine playing this same game with film, not only with the urban elites of Bangkok, but with villagers in Weerasethakul’s native north who have only limited experience with cinema and no real concept of fiction. The results are both primitive and startling. Filmed in black & white with the cheapest imaginable equipment and film stock, Mysterious Object is something akin to a surrealist version of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera set in the Thailand of the 1990s, which means everything from contemporary skyscrapers and freeway onramps to elephants wandering into the scene as some boys who’ve been playing a version of hacky sack try to improvise what might come next. One group of villagers act out their section, which includes music (some of it involving a mouth organ unlike anything I’ve ever seen before). Another woman, early on, simply tells her own story, which involves being sold by her father in return for bus fare. There is a long truck ride through Bangkok at the beginning that feels like an homage both to Vertov and to Tarkovsky’s Solaris until the driver and his partner start trying to sell tuna. During the course of the film, the teacher gives birth – tho that verb phrase doesn’t really do justice to what actually happens – to a young man who zips her unconscious body into a closet and ransacks the student’s home, World War 2 comes to a conclusion, the populace is admonished to buy American products, aliens invade, and the teacher gets a rash. The young boy is both much loved and abandoned by his parents. At one point, the boy to whom the teacher gives birth turns into a murderous giant. The one element that Weerasethakul uses to keep his various narrative threads from entirely spinning out of control is a small team of actors who periodically act out some of the threads narrated by different speakers.

This film works for many of the same reasons that any artwork that is actively trying to invent its own genre does – in this sense, Man with a Movie Camera, as well as books as diverse as Tristram Shandy, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Moby Dick, Spring & All and Visions of Cody, are almost parallel projects. Each questions everything and makes no assumptions as to how to proceed. In this context, even a wrong decision (presuming of course we could define such) would be a fresh one. At the same time, Weerasethakul clearly understands this role as historical – there is a scene in which the film-maker and his colleagues are walking along & one comments “We should have had a script.” The film ends when & where it does because that’s where, literally, the film stock Weerasethakul had at his disposal ran out.

If you don’t care for experimental cinema, you can almost be certain that you’re going to hate this film. Even if you love the work of Stan Brakhage, Warren Sonbert & Abigail Child, you may find it hard to imagine that something like this can still be produced in the 21^st century. Would it still hold its fascination if the film were in English about Oakland? Frankly, it might not – Steve Benson, who first turned me on Mysterious Object, calls Tropical Malady, Weerasethakul’s other film available through NetFlix, “catastrophically disappointing” tho it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2004. In any event, there is this film, which taken on its own is a dive into a culture – and into a perspective on cinema – that few of us will every have the opportunity to experience directly. As such, it’s a trip you should probably take.

Venus, the film for which Peter O’Toole received his most recent Oscar nomination for acting, may be one of the first in a genre that I can safely predict we will be seeing a lot more of in the relatively near future – the senior date flick. It’s not the first – indeed not even the first by director Roger Michell, best known for Notting Hill, who also directed The Mother, a movie one could read as the feminine counterpart to Venus. In that earlier film, Anne Reid beds her daughter’s boyfriend, played by a pre-Bond Daniel Craig looking rather fuzzy in a beard. In Venus, O’Toole plays a randy old thespian who becomes enchanted with his friend’s niece’s daughter, Jessie, portrayed by relative newcomer Jodie Whittaker. The age difference here is not subtle – O’Toole starred in Lawrence of Arabia twenty years before Whittaker was born.

I’ve never been that fond of O’Toole as an actor, but in Venus he is simply brilliant, conveying a difficult combination of lust & fatherly pride often with little more than his eyes or the corners of his mouth. Even as an over-the-top letch – one-part Henry Higgins, one-part Larry Flynt – O’Toole has to be a minimalist in his portrayal for this role to work, since Whittaker’s character is defined by sullen youth & a rural working-class inarticulateness. Once O’Toole’s character – and the audience – figure out why this woman, whom O’Toole insists on calling Venus, was sent away to the city, it becomes apparent that she has no intention ever of returning to the bog from whence she came, but she also has almost no job skills & only a modicum of curiosity. Her basic reaction to most comments on the part of others is to stare back at them wordlessly – a type that cinema has typically relegated to macho actors like Charles Bronson or Robert Mitchum. If a female is given these characteristics, it usually means that she’s a woman of mystery. But if Jessie is a mystery in Venus, it’s primarily to herself. That’s a difficult role to play – Whittaker is superb in it – but an even more difficult role to play off of, and this is where O’Toole’s mastery really takes command. There’s not a scene in this film – tho O’Toole’s appearance at the Oscars suggests that this might not be all acting – in which the actor’s body language doesn’t suggest some level of discomfort.

Michell livens the picture up by giving the audience more than a little of O’Toole’s character engaged with his buddies, portrayed by Leslie Phillips & recent Tony award winner Richard Giffiths, whose scenes are, for the most part, played as pure comedy. Another important story arc involves O’Toole’s character’s ex-wife, portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.

It’s not unusual for Hanif Kureishi scripts – My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, Intimacy & The Mother are others – to focus on characters more than plot and Venus is no exception. O’Toole’s Maurice tries hard to live large, but in many respects he’s a shell of the man he once may have been, still working well into his seventies, residing in a small flat behind a café while his ex-, one of several characters he helps out financially in this film, still lives in the big house with all the memorabilia from his glory days. There’s a scene in which Jessie/Venus wants some nice clothes so he takes her to a posh boutique to try on some little black dresses, knowing full well that he lacks the funds to pay for anything. From his perspective, it’s the process that counts, but she’s humiliated & furious.

Whittaker’s character also has to walk a fine line between her disgust at the age of this man who wants to lick her shoulder or put his hands on her bosom – it might become “vomitous” she suggests – while at the same time actually liking him. In general, she does a fine job. This would be an interesting film to see in a triple bill with the likes of Gods and Monsters or Mighty Aphrodite, pictures that portray older men (Ian McKellan & Woody Allen) attracted to young beauties (Brendan Fraser & Mira Sorvino). Venus is the only one of the three to suggest that a young person might be physically repulsed by such advances. Although, and this is where Michell’s subtlety as a director confronts its limit, O’Toole’s Maurice is the only one of the three older men to be wearing a catheter.

Part of what makes this a senior date flick – the average age of the audience at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute where I saw it last weekend appeared to be well into the sixties – is that it’s comfortably predictable. If you can’t tell where this film is going, it’s not that they haven’t painted a picture for you. Two of them, in fact, both quite literal. Similarly, an important detail between Maurice and his ex-wife – she describes herself only as his wife in the one scene where that’s a significant fact – is that he abandoned her with three children under the age of six. But there are scenes where the presence of children would seem essential, and these narrative kiddies (all grown up now we presume) are nowhere in sight. The repartee between the three male actors may be comic, but at points it descends into literal slapstick – there is one scene that could have appeared in a Three Stooges vehicle & another, when O’Toole is trying to spy on Jessie modeling for a life drawing class, & finds himself hanging from a door as it swings open & takes out an easel or two, which draws a cheap laugh until you realize just how cheap it was. Maurice also has an illness & you know just which part of the body is most directly affected.

Still, films in which seniors are taken as lead characters are themselves rare enough. Venus is an enjoyable diversion – more if you’re interested in watching how a great actor can carry one scene after another – but hopefully the aging of the film-going populace won’t restrict our choices going forward just to date flicks organized around the fantasies of impotent old men.

In 2004, Berkeley-born Ryan Fleck won awards at the Aspen Shortfest, the Boston Independent Film Festival & the Sundance Film Festival for a short film entitled Gowanus, Brooklyn. It was his third short film & the second to star Karen Chilton, a New York playwright & actress better known as the co-author of Gloria Lynne’s memoir, I Wish You Love. In the tradition of a lot of award-winning short films, Fleck used the positive attention to pull together backing for a feature-length version of the same tale, which included Chilton playing the mother once again to Shareeka Epps, the Binghamton, NY, high-school senior who has gone on to win numerous awards for her role as the 13-year old Drey who develops a relationship with her charismatic, crack-addicted history teacher & basketball coach, portrayed this time around by former Mousketeer Ryan Gosling¹. The film of course is Half Nelson, for which Gosling earned an Oscar nomination. Both Gosling & Epps won Independent Spirit Awards for best lead, male & female. They deserved it too.

I sort of avoided this movie when it first came out to rave reviews last year. Being an indie made that easy as us ex-urbanite Chester County types have to go some distance to see independent films under the best of circumstances. But the subject matter sounded so terribly sad – and the end result, either a death or an arrest, seemed so predictable, that I just shied away. It wasn’t until I caught a rerun of the Ebert & Roeper show on television in which Kevin Smith, a director I generally like, declared Half Nelson one of the ten best films of the past decade that I reconsidered. Then last weekend, a friend slipped me their Blockbuster copy while we were standing around in the lobby waiting for the high school musical to get under way.

So I was surprised to discover that neither of the predictable end results is what happens here, surprised and frankly pleased. In large part, this is because this film intersects with the story already in progress & leaves it well before it reaches either of those logical conclusions. It can do this because it’s not about that story, but rather about the relationship between the two key characters, a charismatic, committed, very likeable history teacher who can’t get away from freebasing crack, and a troubled 13-year-old student who catches him blasted one day in the locker room &, for reasons that have everything to do with her history, decides not to tell anyone.

An awful lot of this film really is about nothing other than the complexity of these two individuals, only tiny portions of which come out in dialog. There are scenes early on, such as when Gosling’s Dan Dunne sees his ex-girlfriend, through rehab & engaged to be married, before she sees him, where the viewer can recognize, just in Gosling’s body language and facial expression, the degree to which the character struggles with his fight-or-flight response. There are several moments when Epps’ Drey glares her way through a scene – Epps is easily the most intense “child actor” I’ve ever seen on screen. She doesn’t need language to articulate the anger she feels at the loss of her brother, who is in prison, or the devastation she senses as a latch-key kid to an emergency medical technician single parent. When the local crack dealer, intelligently played by Anthony Mackie, attempts to recruit her to handle the final exchange of product for cash – she’s the one taking the risk of being busted for dealing – her diffidence & hesitancies as she tests out this path says an enormous amount about her tentative sense of self & self-worth.

Much of this film is about emotional clumsiness. By refusing to adhere to the school’s approved curriculum – he’s showing his students videos of Mario Savio, the Attica massacre, the murder of Harvey Milk, the U.S. role in the coup in Chile, trying to teach dialectics to middle-school kids – the teacher is practically screaming to be fired. Both of the film’s two sex scenes – one of them an attempted rape – are about vulnerability, not eros. When the teacher shows up at school with a stitch on his lip, he covers it with an American flag Band-Aid. A meal at home with his parents is excruciating – the only person he can talk to is his brother’s new girlfriend, whom he’s never met before. When, after the dope dealer has warned Drey to stay clear of the “basehead” teacher, the two older men in her life confront one another, the result is not Fort Apache, Brooklyn, but almost in the manner of two uncles attempting to watch out for the orphan niece. Even the film’s climactic & concluding scenes are all about clumsiness, vulnerability &, at least on one level, acceptance. This film is a choreographer’s dream of emotional missteps, which is what I think Kevin Smith was responding to with his (somewhat overly) generous assessment.

I’ve had the opportunity, if that’s the right word, to see what freebasing can do to a professional, even a single a parent, and I know that the spiral that this teacher is in can – and almost inevitably will – get a whole lot worse, far, far uglier. It would have been easy to have made that movie, it’s one we’ve seen a dozen times, but the result wouldn’t have been one-tenth as solid as Half Nelson.

 

¹ Gosling was part of the Mickey Mouse Club cast during the fabled 1993-94 period, the end of that show’s third incarnation, that also included Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears & Justin Timberlake. Gosling, a Canadian, lived with Timberlake’s family during filming. While the other three got into bubblegum music, Gosling stuck to acting & subsequently has been in a lot of the dog movies & TV series aimed at teens, such as Young Hercules, but in the process has become a tremendously subtle actor. It’s like watching the next Johnny Depp emerge, tho Gosling lacks Depp’s phenomenally feminine good looks.

Musidora as Irma Vep, 1915

We were in the mood for a change of pace & so decided to watch Irma Vep, a 1996 French flick by Olivier Assayas starring the unlikely couple of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Maggie Cheung. Afterwards, Krishna characterized it as “completely French,” by which she meant obtuse, compelling & likeable all at once. I think her take is completely on target.

Léaud of course started out as the boy actor Francois Truffaut used as a surrogate for himself, starting with 400 Blows. Later Léaud became the protégé of Jean-Luc Godard, starring in such classics as Weekend, Masculine-Feminine, Le Chinoise & Pierrot Le Fou. Although he served for a time as an assistant director for both Truffaut & Godard, Léaud ended up primarily focusing on acting, continuing on in such films as Last Tango in Paris (where he refused to act on the same days of the week as Marlon Brando), 36 Fillette, even an uncredited role in the Cate Blanchett version of Elizabeth. Léaud is noted for his use of improvisation, indeed is often hired for this, and is known for mumbling his way through roles, something he does to good effect here as the director who is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And then some.

The Hong Kong-born but British-schooled Maggie Cheung, on the other hand, is a major Hong Kong action film star. With 84 films under her belt, the spokesperson for Hermes & Lux actually has appeared in two more films than Léaud, even tho he is 20 years her senior. Indeed, in the marketing of the film’s DVD in both France & the United Kingdom, Cheung is clearly given top billing. In the US, she & Léaud both have their name above the title.

This film is a version of what is by now a film type: the parodic insider view of the making of a motion picture. From 8½ to Ed Wood to Tristram Shandy to the documentary Lost in La Mancha, variations on this theme are so familiar that it requires a brilliant variation to make the genre stand up at all. In this regard, Assayas’ version has several things going for it. First, the lead actress plays herself, and seemingly does not speak French, which enables pretty much the rest of the cast to talk about her in her presence without her responding or reacting. Second, the premise is that Léaud’s character, a director in some serious decline, has been hired to remake the French film classic Les Vampires, a silent serial from 1915 starring the actress Musidora. Les Vampires, about a gang of jewel thieves, may be the first action film to star a woman: Irma Vep is literally an anagram of the word vampire. Third, there is a question in the plot of the film as to the level to which Cheung’s preparation of her role goes beyond the usual bounds of method acting. Fourth, when Léaud’s character goes entirely around the bend & has to be replaced, the new director – whose one demand is that they fire the Chinese actress – sees Léaud’s work, edited in progress, only to discover that Léaud has hand altered virtually every frame, giving this remake of the familiar 1915 fare (which we see more than once) a shocking, pseudo-avant garde climax.

Made in a month’s time after Assayas met Cheung at a film festival, Vep is a study in the ways in which film-making’s situation as a collaboration under capital alienates all of its workers. This is worth thinking about given the number of new corporate gurus, starting with In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters, love to use the trope of the film production team as a model for next-generation business: specialists coming together for a set and limited time to create a specific product, then disappearing again into the night (without, dare we say, lasting benefits or any concept of the value of experience manifested through seniority). Just as Hollywood is a system in which the rare individual becomes Tom Hanks while everyone else waits on tables, Irma Vep shows pretty much everyone under stress & deeply isolated. At the end of the day’s shoot, Cheung, speaking no French & not knowing her way around Paris, finds herself abandoned on the set save for the costume designer who escorts the actress to dinner with some of her friends (who in turn try to set this up as a sexual seduction). She is asked, more than once during the film, what Hong Kong audiences think of French cinema, having to confess each time that Hong Kong audiences never get to see French films. So the constant back-biting among the film crew, which is genuinely vicious and undercuts the film’s marketing as a comedy, is in this sense an expression of the film’s primary theme: an ideal cinema is impossible under capital.

This is reinforced in the one interview Cheung gives while on the set, with a French journalist who can’t stop yattering about how bad French films are, made by intellectuals for an elite through government subsidies, so unlike the “great” American “directors,” Schwarzenegger & Van Damme. When the new director, played by Lou Castel (and given a Spanish name, José Mirano), arrives, his motivation for taking on the project has much to do with the fact that his welfare is running out.

There are other layers worth noting here, including the discussions of costumes and Cheung’s figure, particularly when contrasted with the fuller figure of Musidora in the role in 1915. Assayas has done a remarkably good job of bringing together a lot of interesting, intellectually crunchy ideas, into a film that easily could have collapsed into predictability but instead offers itself instead as the most bittersweet of comedies.

Ray Winstone & Leonardo Di Caprio

Try and look at The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s masterful crime drama that’s up for the Best Picture Oscar this year – and which just might really be the best picture nominated – from the perspective of Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, the directors of Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong-based thriller on which Scorsese’s Boston drama is based. Infernal Affairs largely is patterned, lovingly so, after the work of Martin Scorsese & Quentin Taratino (never mind that Taratino himself has based his career on Scorsese). So the master comes along and pays you the ultimate compliment of making an adaptation of your film, adds 50 minutes to the length of it but comes out with something that feels far less padded than Infernal Affairs & clearly one of the three best films of Scorsese’s fabled career – other two being Mean Streets & take your pick from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull & Goodfellas. My pick would be Raging Bull, but it’s worth noting just how much The Sopranos has been living off Goodfellas, even its cast, for years. Taxi Driver might not be the paradigm shifter that Mean Streets was, but it’s probably the one where most people actually noticed the shift. “You talkin’ to me?” is still one of the iconic film sentences of all time. In The Departed, the master shows just how it’s done and it’s breath-taking just how well he does it. Having seen Infernal Affairs first only reinforces the difference, and Infernal Affairs is actually a pretty good movie.

What surprised me most when I finally got to see The Departed this past week was its tautness – compared with Infernal Affairs, it’s a master class on how pacing, editing & the presence of the right score (Scorsese’s with its almost gentle Rolling Stones undertones is by Lord of the Rings veteran Howard Shore) are what make a film tight, not length. The film also showcases the best acting Jack Nicholson has done in at least a decade & the best Leonardo Di Caprio has done since, say, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? (for which Di Caprio rightfully was nominated for an Oscar). Di Caprio comes across as a completely different human being in this film, something Matt Damon couldn’t do if his life depended on it (Damon’s a decent enough thespian, tho with limited range), and something Nicholson hasn’t tried since Five Easy Pieces. The one Oscar nod for acting to come out of this film, for Mark Wahlberg’s good cop with a bad mouth, is bizarre given the degree to which Di Caprio & Nicholson offer master classes here. Marky Mark hardly has more to do in this film than his brother Robert, who plays an FBI agent. Also excellent in smaller roles are Vera Farmiga, as the police psychologist who always falls for the wrong guys, and British actor Ray Winstone, as one of Nicholson’s goons, Mr. French.

The plot of the two movies is identical. Street kid gets noticed by local mob boss & sent to the police academy in order to give the boss a pair of ears on the inside; second police cadet gets picked for a deep undercover assignment & accordingly gets drummed out of the academy, given a rap sheet, and told to fend for himself as he infiltrates the mob boss’ organization. At which point both the undercover cop and the “rat” inside the police department spend much time trying to figure out just who the other one is, while also not getting caught themselves. The architecture of the plot, originally written by Siu with Felix Chong, is marvelously crafted & dazzlingly complex. It’s certainly conceivable that I found Scorsese’s telling “cleaner” because I’d already seen Infernal Affairs, but I don’t really think so. One of the layers of difficulty that Scorsese has added is the physical similarities of Di Caprio and Damon, which could (and I think this is intentional on the director’s part) confuse even fans of the two, especially during the first half hour of the film. That’s not in the Hong Kong film. Another is the presence of Boston accents all around. I felt, as I often do, say, when watching Shakespeare, that I could have used subtitles for the first ten or so minutes as my ears adjusted.

Scorsese has been one of America’s top directors now for over thirty years, which means that there are by now at least two additional generations of directors who’ve grown up admiring and imitating his work, Tarantino foremost among them. Thanks especially to the original script, this is Scorsese’s most Tarantino-esque film, with an ending that comes right out of Pulp Fiction. There are several important scenes in which Scorsese’s adeptness is put on high display. There is one key scene, fairly late in the film, in which one of the gangsters figures out, right at the point he’s dying, that Di Caprio is the undercover cop. In Infernal Affairs, this is played out around an auto accident, but Scorsese ups the stakes by setting the scene in a warehouse where Costello’s gang has gone after a bloody shoot-out with the police. With the other gangsters literally in the background Di Caprio has to convey the tension of the scene entirely in his eyes, the corners of his mouth & in a consciously restricted use of body language and does so brilliantly. When I saw Internal Affairs, I actually had to replay that scene to make sure that it meant what I thought it meant.

Indeed, there are very few scenes in Internal Affairs that are notably better than The Departed. The first (and perhaps most important) is the scene on the roof where the two protagonists finally confront one another – it’s a scene that, in Infernal Affairs, owes more to movies like Die Hard and Dirty Harry than it does to Scorsese, and Scorsese downplays the vista right where Infernal Affairs made it a major part of the scene. A second, perhaps for the same reasons, is the fall of the police official who has been running the undercover operation inside the gang. There is also an important difference in the set up to the funeral scene, as to just who decided to recommend the deceased for honors. Scorsese’s solution underscores the sliminess of a key character, where Infernal Affairs accentuated the role of the romance. I actually prefer Scorsese’s approach here, tho I think you could make an argument for either one.

The Departed is a more complex, more compelling film than either Babel or The Queen, even if it lacks the social importance of the former or the challenge of making a film where so little happens on the surface of things. Little Miss Sunshine is an American comedy, a genre I readily admit to despising. I found it better than, say, My Name is Earl, the best of the comedies on TV, but that’s not saying very much. And I haven’t seen either of Clint Eastwood’s two war films, tho I expect that eventually I shall. So when the Oscars are passed out next week, The Departed will be my dog in that hunt. And as for best director? Well, Scorsese has been that now pretty much for 35 years or so, even with his worst costume dramas. But a process which can give a “Best Picture” Oscar to the likes of Rocky, Out of Africa, Shakespeare in Love or Chicago obviously should not be trusted. Giving a statuette to Martin Scorsese will honor the Oscars far more than it will Scorsese.

I’m obviously a sucker for Mongolian movies. One of my favorite films ever is Urga, which was distributed in the United States under the hokey & inappropriate title of Close to Eden.¹ Nikita Makalkov’s 1991 film tells the tale of a Russian truck driver whose vehicle breaks down in Mongolia and who is half-rescued, half-adopted by a nomadic Mongolian family that is on something of an epic quest. If you ask the women, the quest is for birth control in the form of condoms so that they won’t have such difficult lives, but if you ask the men the quest is for a TV set. By film’s end, the women have what they want and the men have rigged up a makeshift antenna that allows them to watch Rambo and the press conferences of George H.W. Bush. One of the many amazing scenes in this film comes when the group finally reaches a city, presumably Ulan Bator, and they find their way to a Mongolian rock-&-roll club.

Genghis Blues is the 1999 documentary of a San Francisco street musician, the late Paul Peña, who manages not only to learn Tuvan throat singing, the deep music in which the singer literally sings two notes at once, but gets invited to Tuva, the Russian province immediately north of Mongolia, for a bi-annual throat-singing festival & contest, where he actually wins an award. To make this improbable but true story even stranger, a key figure in all of this is the late physicist Richard Feynman, who as one of the world’s leading scientists parlayed a childhood interest in stamps – he had one from Tuva back during the brief period when it was an independent nation prior to Soviet consolidation of its indigenous peoples that showed a race between hot air balloons and camels – into an exploration of a country that had disappeared. His foundation to this day sponsors cultural exchange activities between the U.S. and Tuva. One result: Genghis Blues has some of the best music ever put on film.

Lü cao di is a 2005 film by the Chinese director Ning Hao that tells the tale of three boys, roughly age 7, who live with a nomadic group which is starting to show signs of setting down roots, building yurts out of brick & attempting (with no success) to construct a windmill. Krishna found this gem at Blockbuster where it’s being distributed under the title of Mongolian Ping Pong. At least, unlike what happened to Close to Eden, the English title has some relation to the film itself.

The three boys, Bilike, Dawa & Erguotou, discover a ping pong ball floating down the little spaghetti-thin curlicue of a river that runs by their clan’s settlement. Although these erstwhile nomads are far more modernized and westernized than the group in Urga – they have TV, t-shirts, Dawa wears a baseball cap while Erguotou zooms around the steppes on a small scooter, plus there are bottles & jars visible in the background in their yurts – the boys have no clue what this round object might be. Much prodding, holding it up against the light of the sky and licking it convinces them that it can’t be an egg, so that it must be a glowing pearl. They consult with a local lama, but since he’s only ten, he doesn’t have much more in the way of worldly experience. Later, the trio learn almost by accident that it is a ping pong ball – they don’t know what that means exactly & their informant says simply that it’s the “national game” – which leaves them with a further mystery. They have, they believe, “the national ball,” which they deduce must be a treasure. So it must be returned.

Interestingly, given that Mongolia is a sovereign nation, the boys decide that “the capital” to which they must return the ball is Beijing.² A good portion of the rest of the movie consists of their trek, literally attempting to cross the Gobi Desert with nothing more than two horses & a scooter, some stolen moon cake & a couple of bottles of water. No matter that the Gobi Desert is in the wrong direction in the first place.

There are other plots surrounding this central tale – the father’s attempt to modernize their living quarters (his mother’s complaint about the brick yurt is that it’s “square and uncomfortable”), an oldest daughter’s desire to join an ethnic dancing troupe that would require her to move to the unnamed city (it appears to be far too small to be Ulan Bator). By the time the film is over the children have been rescued, the father has traded the TV for a pair of goats, the girl is heading into the city to join her troupe and Bilike accompanies her in order to attend school. In the city, he sees things he never imagined, about which I cannot say more here.

Two things for me really made this film fascinating. First is just watching how much this version of nomadic life had modernized from the Russian portrayal of 14 years earlier – one can sense the slow encroachment of globalization at the deepest level of people’s lives, such as the sister’s application of lipstick for her audition with the troupe.

The other was the photography by Du Jie. This is the most static motion picture I have ever seen – the camera, with surprisingly few exceptions, takes a position and if the action wanders off-screen, it doesn’t move to follow it. Scenes at night are shot with no illumination. Often the characters are at a middle distance with the panorama of the Mongolian steppes or grass fields & barren tundra of the Gobi stretching out behind them. Scene after scene opens out onto breath-taking vistas with no comment whatsoever from the characters. Only one actually feels gratuitous, a late scene that captures the whole of a rainbow. Visually, this is one of the most beautiful motion pictures I’ve ever seen. But what’s most interesting is how the static nature of the camera work insinuates a cognitive, even narrative frame around the story itself. Looking deliberately primitive & implying a lack of sophistication without ever saying as much, the film suggests an inner landscape for the clan. At the same time, the film reverses some (western?) sexual stereotypes: the father is supportive of his daughter’s wish to join the troupe, and it’s the mothers here who are presented as brutal & cruel.

All three of these motion pictures are filmed by outsiders – tho there has been Mongolian cinema since the 1930s, the one true Mongolian-made film I’ve ever seen is The Story of the Weeping Camel – and it’s easy to see both in Urga and Lü cao di a wish to portray Mongolians as some variant of “noble savages.” But what separates both of these films from simply racist fare like The Gods Must Be Crazy is that the confrontation with the modern world, which in some form or other sets the action going in each, is framed precisely in terms of what impacts the outer world is having on the nomadic group. The clan isn’t running away from technology – it’s Bilike’s father who wants someone to build him his dream of a windmill – but it’s skeptical in what it appropriates. When they stop getting decent reception from their TV, it has less value than two goats.

 

¹ Urga literally is the original name of the Mongolian capital Ulan Bator.

² This is consistent with thinking of ping pong as the “national” game, which it may be in China, while the most popular sport in Mongolia proper is wrestling.

Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver is the most original motion picture I’ve seen in ages. With a plot worthy of Hitchcock at his most whimsical, the most ardently feminist vision in a major motion picture since Thelma & Louise – women take care of one another, men are loners who abuse & abandon – and a tremendous cast with women in every major role, Volver is one of those terrific evenings at the movies you want to go on & on.

Volver is a film about relationships between women, but not necessarily one about easy camaraderie. Agustina, played by Spanish TV and theater actress Blanca Portillo, makes a serious, even desperate, request of her lifelong friend & one-time neighbor, Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, but Raimunda fails to take her seriously. Raimunda rejected her mother in life so deeply that when the spirit of the mother – portrayed by Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown star Carmen Maura – returns, she hides from her daughter. Raimunda refuses to tell her own daughter Paula, played by the brilliantly sulking Yohana Cobo, who her biological father really is. Raimunda lies to Emilio, who leaves her the keys to his failing restaurant, and to anyone who asks the whereabouts of her husband Paco. Her own mother’s deceptions are no less grand.

I’m not the right person to judge whether or not Almadóvar is the best person to make a film that is so thoroughly from a woman’s point of view, tho it’s not the first time he’s done this. In many respects, I think this is his most successful motion picture. The narrative architecture is less happenstance & even elegant, the story line compelling, and the acting is terrific. In fact, one reason why Cruz won’t win the Oscar for which she’s been nominated this year (Helen Mirren being another) is that Cruz, who does an effective job throughout and is brilliant in the scenes with her daughter & in one scene in particular, filmed entirely in close-up, where she’s rejected her drunken, unemployed husband & lies in bed listening to him masturbate, is that her work here doesn’t stand out from the first-rate acting of the others, especially Cobo or Maura (who is the most charming ghost since Leo G. Carroll played Cosmo Topper).

As wonderful as Volver is, it does suffer from the perennial film cliché of powerful problems that could have been solved far more simply if only the characters would communicate with one another. It continues to amaze me just how many motion pictures present stories that would unravel if some key character would just ask a question that is screaming to be posed. And while the narrative scaffolding is not nearly as improvised as in Almodóvar’s earlier films, one visit to the river from CSI Madrid would give this film an entirely different – and far more ominous – ending. Further, Raimunda has a janitorial position in a large corporation that simply disappears when it stops being convenient for narrative development. ¿Que pasa? There is also the detail that Raimunda, having been a teenage mother married to a drunken lout & working at back-breaking manual labor for years, remains drop-dead beautiful. And there is, in the middle of all this narrative, a break for one song, something that makes no sense structurally at all.

But other touches are far more subtle & effective. A producer of the film that’s shooting in the vicinity, and who hires Raimunda & the restaurant she has more or less appropriated to feed lunch to his crew, clearly is attracted to Cruz. They don’t get together but the moment where it almost happens is a soft, perfectly directed scene (it’s also the one point in the movie where Almodóvar at least entertains the idea that not all men are monsters). Also pitch perfect are most of the comedic scenes, my favorite being the ghost in the trunk of the car.

The one thing about this movie I flat out don’t understand is how it got an “R” rating. Is it because the plot revolves around “adult” themes? Because we see Cobo, who is supposed to be 14 (but is actually 22), topless for about five seconds? Because there’s blood (tho no violence)? The squeamishness of the American film rating system has hardly ever looked less intelligent.

Warning: spoilers below

What I think of as the ensemble film of globalization is evolving into a genre all its own, and the results so far are pretty good. Traffic, Crash, & Syriana were all serious, well-crafted films involving large casts of actors following multiple story lines that intersect in particular ways. Their ostensible topics may differ – the trio above focused on drugs, racism & oil – but underneath is a core belief that people really are more interconnected, interdependent really, than we imagine. In a sense, each is committed to the idea of the butterfly effect, the thought that how a butterfly flaps its wings in Mongolia will impact the weather in Florida. Except that, at least for the first and last of these three films, the butterfly effect is articulated in the cruder, more violent formula by which most of the rest of the world knows it: Dick Cheney sneezes and the Third World gets pneumonia.

I’ve always thought that the origin of this genre lay in the work of the late Robert Altman, whose Nashville in particular anticipates much the genre would offer: ensemble acting, multiple storylines, people caught up in politics they don’t really understand. In a sense, it’s closer to Crash in that it takes place in one city. I don’t think Altman thought he was doing a film about globalization, but I think he did show a younger generation of filmmakers and screenwriters how to go about it. Both Traffic & Syriana were written by Stephen Gaghan, who also wrote the screenplay for Rules of Engagement, based on a story by Virginia’s new senator, James Webb, and The Alamo, which attempted to de-mythologize what was once known as “Polk’s War.”

The Academy Awards in particular have been good to this genre, awarding Crash the Best Picture prize over the highly favored Brokeback Mountain. In addition to Best Picture, Crash won Oscars for editing and writing, and got a supporting actor nomination for Matt Dillon. Both Traffic and Nashville – both of which are better pictures than Crash – made the shortlist for Best Picture, while George Clooney won for Best Supporting Actor in Syriana, for which Gaghan was nominated for best screenplay adaptation, an award he won previously for Traffic. Magnolia, another film that is formally close to this genre (tho in its case more an instance of Altman-worship), got a supporting actor nomination for Tom Cruise & likewise a nomination for writing for its writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. Lone Star, one of a couple of John Sayles’ pictures to follow this general model, likewise got a writing nomination.

This year’s candidate from the globalization ensemble category is Babel, and it comes will all the requisite elements: three story lines involving four sets of characters, set variously in Morocco, Tokyo, Mexico & Southern California. Even more than Traffic, which based one of its story lines around a major U.S. politician & another around a highly romanticized feminist drug lord, the narrative threads in Babel focus on its non-Anglo characters – the only real exception are the two tourists in Morocco played by Brad Pitt (the role of his lifetime, which he manages not to screw up, letting the bags under his eyes do much of the heavy emotional lifting that’s required) & Cate Blanchett, who increasingly looks like the best actor alive. Even in the Mexican section of the tale, the two children brought across the border by their nanny, stuck with watching the kids on her own son’s wedding day, are little more than a narrative appendage. When, after problems that I won’t recount here, they find themselves stranded – ages 6 and 4 perhaps – in the middle of the desert, the film functionally ignores them, focusing instead on Adriana Barraza’s role as the nanny. Similarly, the film spends at least as much time with the two Moroccan goatherds – themselves children – who are playing with the rifle their father bought to ward off jackals when the younger one shoots into a passing tourist bus on a desolate road. The man who sold them the gun was given it as a gift from a big game hunter from Japan for whom he had served as a guide, and it’s the story of that hunter and especially his deaf teenage daughter, fabulously played by Rinko Kikuchi, that makes up the fourth tale of Babel. In her case, she’s an object of constant rejection & deeply depressed at least partly as a result of her mother’s suicide the year before. Her rage is directed pretty much at everyone around her, tho it gets perilously transformed when she decides to “solve” her problems by losing her virginity, which she proceeds to attempt in the most inappropriate & inept ways. Given that her narrative is to some degree the “comic relief” that contrasts with the Mexican & Moroccan tales, the most powerful scene in the entire movie comes when she gets smashed on pills & whiskey & finds herself in a crowded disco where she alone can’t hear the music. Her isolation is clearly intended to serve as an objective correlative for everyone else’s situation in this film and, as clumsy as that imagery may sound, the director, Alejandro González Iñárittu, makes it the most successful drug & disco scene in a motion picture since David Hemmings ran into The Yardbirds in Blow-Up forty years ago.

Babel is by no means a perfect film – it’s really no stronger than Syriana & a far cry from either Crash or Traffic. Still, by comparison with some pictures that have won the Best Picture Oscar – Chicago, Rocky, Out of Africa, even the bon-bon Shakespeare in Love – Babel is The Godfather and Children of Paradise rolled into one. The relationship between the Japanese family & the events in Morocco is so contrived as to make you want to laugh when you see the connection. Yet like all ensemble pictures, Babel offers a wonderful setting for great acting, even on the part of “amateurs” in Morocco. Barraza & Kikuchi have both been nominated for supporting actress Oscars – a tough category in a year in which Jennifer Hudson single-handedly stole Dreamgirls with her Aretha-meets-Janis song-as-tantrum – and it’s worth noting that without this film genre, neither Barraza or Kikuchi would ever get the kind of multi-million dollar PR boosts to their careers that both are about to receive. Barraza is a great character actor, but great character actors go for decades without recognition. Kikuchi is just starting her career and her credits were heavily weighted with TV commercials and video game roles right up to this last year.

One aspect of Babel, the film, that I found disturbing was its soft landing for all of the Anglo characters – the wife survives, the kids are found (a detail that is not even shown on screen) – while the Moroccan family lies in ruins, the nanny finds herself deported & the teenage girl is left naked & still a virgin when her father finally comes home to the penthouse they share. There are very different ways one could look at this disparity – Iñárittu is chicken & wants to give the audience at least part of a happy ending; Iñárittu wants to show that it is always the others who get hurt most, even when it is the Anglos who appear to be most at risk throughout much of the movie. Either of these results is plausible and, afterwards, the folks I was with and I could not decide which line of reasoning guided the director. In part, I think that the Tokyo story – in which the heroine is clearly a rich kid, living in a penthouse with a father who can go globetrotting to hunt exotic animals – deliberately messes with the race = class equation that would otherwise jump out at you (as it does, say, in Crash). So maybe it’s a step toward a more sophisticated argument that causes Iñárittu to forestall this blow. But there is no question that this robs Babel of a good deal of its potential dramatic effect.

Keanu Reeves is under there, somewhere

A Scanner Darkly, which just came to DVD this past week, may be the most unusual “Hollywood” movie I’ve ever seen. Not because of the “rotoscoping” process through which the live action of actors is “painted over” via software, frame by frame, giving it a cartoon-like surface – Richard Linklater’s done that before, in Waking Life – but because A Scanner Darkly may be the first reasonably serious attempt at a faithful presentation of a Philip K. Dick novel.

And not just any Dick novel either, but one of his most autobiographical and well-known, the tale of the drug-addicted cop of the near future. Further, Richard Linklater decided to make a film about heavy drug use with a cast that includes, in the key roles, Robert Downey, Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder & Keanu Reeves (still taking the red pill, no less). Ryder’s father, who was an assistant of LSD advocate Timothy Leary (literally Winona’s god father), knew Dick during the author’s meth & psychedelics years, Harrelson has been active in attempts to legalize marijuana, and the fathers of both Harrelson & Reeves have done serious prison time, the latter for possession of heroin.

I’ve noted before that short stories are often more susceptible to good film adaptations than are entire novels, because the richness of the latter always means a certain telescoping down of the project, while a short story often leaves the screenwriter & director with room to build in elements that ensure that the film works. Here, if memory serves (and it’s been decades since I’ve read the book, tho one of my sons may have a copy around here somewhere), it’s primarily the relationship between Arctor (Reeves) and his girlfriend Donna (Ryder), who is also, unbeknownst to him, his boss in the Orange County Police Department, that suffers here. But that’s a redaction on the order of those made, say, by Peter Jackson in translating LOTR to the screen – not impossible & regrettable mostly because Winona Ryder is better here than she has been in anything in years.

What we get instead are, first, an exceptionally paranoid narrative – right up there with David Cronenberg’s Videodrome & Alan Pakula’s Parallax View or anything by Bill Burroughs – in which the same organization that “cures” addicts of their craving for Substance D (a.k.a. Death) secretly produces it in vast quantities, “the flower of the future,” in its rural rehabilitation farms. Functionally, the corporation New Path is occupying virtually every position in the Substance D value chain: they’re even heavily enmeshed with the police. Indeed, it’s the old Burroughs junk as an economy equation all over again, but with something closer to crack than smack.

The second thing we get – and the best version of it since Trainspotting – is a deep inside view of the wrong side of drug use, the affect of addiction. A Scanner Darkly is almost a love song to methamphetamine abuse, with its paranoia, hallucinations, verbal tics, random gun use, hysteria, outright psychosis & disconnection with the body. Everyone has their own personal way of relating to addiction: Donna doesn’t like to be touched; Freck (Rory Cochrane) is isolated & suicidal, hallucinating bugs emerging literally from the pores of his body; Barris (Downey) verbally weaves loopy conspiracy theories around his constant paranoia; Luckman (Harrelson) isn’t in touch with his own paranoia until it suddenly bursts through his loopy persona & he dissolves in hysteria, which does more than once; Arctor (Reeves) can barely imagine doing anything at all. But when asked, everybody has the same answer to the question about their drug use: How much are you doing? Not that much. The interactions of the druggies represent some of the best ensemble theater I’ve ever seen in a picture.

The premise of the narrative that operates through this cast is simple. In a world of near total surveillance, where 20 percent of population is addicted to Substance D, including most of the cops dedicated to the arrest & prosecution of dealers & users, nobody can trust anyone. One way around this is that cops use not just pseudonyms, but dress in constantly changing holosuits, ongoing collages of images that make it impossible to settle on one or two, giving the individual a sense of being a “vague blur,” halfway between a David Salle painting & a TV constantly flipping channels before you can quite identify what you’re seeing. The cops do all this with one another at the station, or when representing the department out in the community, so only a few superiors ever get to know who their fellow officers might be. Arctor, a cop using the pseudonym Agent Fred, as well as an addict, is the given the job of investigating and arresting himself. Why he’s investigating himself & what it will lead him to find won’t become clear until the final moments of the picture.

What pulls these two domains together – the aimless & disjointed one of Death heads riffing on their fears, the twisty little noir plot an efficient engine of narrative motion – is the rotoscoping process that transforms live action into an instance of cartoon. One of my sons saw it as integral to the film’s message – they’re there but they don’t seem real. Not unlike Arctor’s wife & two kids, a world of family values that he rues turning his back on, but which may never have existed. Rotoscoping, which has been making its way into commercials over the past year, requires 500 hours of labor for each minute of film. It’s really essential for the special effects – especially the holosuits – but it’s here more for what it does for the story.

Linklater, whose last four films include the terrific little romance, Before Sunset, Bad News Bears, Fast Food Nation & this, is – along with Steven Soderbergh – one of two Hollywood directors who seem ready to take on anything. There are risks in that – Soderbergh has made both great movies & total dogs and I can’t envision the circumstance under which I could be persuaded to watch the Bears remake. Scanner Darkly isn’t the best film ever made & it seems almost gratuitous to call it science fiction. But whatever it is, it’s one of the best of those, and that makes it eminently worth watching.

Perhaps this is a question for Gary Sullivan, someone who knows in some depth the world of the graphic novel &, behind it, the several generations now of comic book artists since The Yellow Kid who have contributed to popular culture. While I was a reasonably serious consumer of comics as a kid – Leslie Scalapino & I were both dedicated fans of the Classic Comics series, which did more for education than, say, the No Child Left Behind act – I can’t say that I’ve paid that much attention later in life. Yet with Pulitzer-Prize winning Art Spiegelman having been all but formally anointed the official graphic novelist of the New Yorker & more than a few summer movies each year deriving from the genre – the last one I saw was V for Vendetta, moderately entertaining as yet another vehicle for the curious acting career of Hugo Weaving, but American Splendor a couple of years back was in fact delightful – I bit when one of my sons made the pitch to me that I seriously needed to read Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, which won a Hugo and, as it notes on the bright yellow cover, was once listed as “one of Time Magazine’s 100 best novels.” To which I can only reply: consider the source.

There is no question that Watchman is important historically, simply because it established the graphic novel as genre, and that it clearly wanted to be taken seriously from day one. Moore’s critical elevation, unlike, say, the French obsession with Jerry Lewis awhile back, is not the consequence of too much red wine in the diet. The first person to take Alan Moore that seriously was Alan Moore.

Moore, like Harvey Pekar of American Splendor, writes the comic, leaving the artwork to others in this supremely visual medium. Which leaves me asking, What is writing in this context? Where does it end? Not to mention, What are its values? How can we tell if it is “any good”? Etc. Etc. Etc. At least Pekar and his partner Joyce Brabner were given credit for writing the original comics on which American Splendor was based. The credits for V for Vendetta mention only the Wachowski brothers for the screenplay, tho the original comic was done by, who else, Alan Moore.¹ League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, another Moore venture to reach the screen, does credit him, as did the Johnny Depp venture, From Hell. Watchmen is scheduled to be done as film in 2008, Zack Snyder (the 2005 remake of Dawn of the Dead is his big credit to date, tho he is completing yet another film based on a graphic novel, 300, which will appear next summer).

At one level, Moore writes the general directions of the plot, plus the dialog. For 11 of the 12 comics in which Watchmen first appeared, there was also a short section, mostly four pages, of relatively “pure text,” presented for example as excerpts from memoirs, newspaper accounts or a gushing interview, but the rest looks pretty much as what you would expect from a comic – pictures with word balloons. But we also get running interior monologs, especially from Rorschach, the somewhat faceless character in front in the group portrait above. There is also, especially in the early chapters, a comic within the comic, foreshadowing the outcome of the larger series with especially grim humor. Finally, Moore has a reputation from doing more than giving general instructions to an artist. In a sidebar to its 2003 profile, “How Alan Moore Transformed American Comics,” Slate (ignoring the obvious detail that Moore is not American, but British) printed Moore’s “instructions” for a single frame (on a page containing six such frames) of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:

Now we close in a little more. All we can see of Quatermain now is a sliver of his profile over to the left of the panel, looking away from us with widening eyes and an expression of dawning mute shock towards the background, across the other side of the counter. To the right of the middleground, we can see the Si Fan guy looking angry and agitated as he waves the half-melted brush under Shen Yan's nose. We can't see much of Shen Yan, since he is nearly off the right of the panel here, but what we can see of him looks abashed and apologetic. More to the left centre of the middleground, the door behind the counter has now swung open even wider. Looking through it we see a terrible, bizarre, and at first confusing scene. Sitting on an ornate stool with his back to us, wearing a long and magnificent looking robe and a mandarin's pillbox hat, his pig tail hanging down the back, we see a rear view of our devil doctor. In his right hand he holds up a paintbrush. The tip of it, thick with paint, is smouldering. Standing on the floor to our right of the seated doctor we see a kind of raised pot or brazier. Smouldering in it is some sort of thick and caustic liquid. The doctor pauses with his brush in hand as if he were an artist considering his next stroke. In the background beyond the seated doctor, hanging with his wrists bound together and attached to a beam above his head, we see a terrified and agonized looking Chinese man who is stripped to the waist and facing us over the top of the doctor's head, which is turned away from us. There is a gag in the man's mouth, so that he cannot scream. His black hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat, and sweat stands out in beads on his brow. This is Ho Ling, a minor opium trader of Limehouse mentioned in Thomas Burke's "London Nights" if you're even remotely interested. He is quite a big man, maybe running slightly to flab. Painted in a vertical row down the middle of his naked chest are a number of Chinese characters (again, I'll have to wait until I've consulted Steve Moore before I can tell you what they actually are). All of these characters are smoking and smouldering. They are painted onto the man's chest in some sort of terrible acidic, caustic goo that the devil doctor is using instead of paint. Over to the right, the Si Fan guy and Shen Yan continue their Chinese conversation.

If the tale itself in Watchmen reads like a storyboard for a film, the instructions to the artist from this other project come closer to a 19^th century novel. But as the casual, off-hand tone (“if you’re interested”) of these instructions suggests, Moore’s focus here isn’t on literary style, nor even in laying out all of the details, tho one senses, both from glimpses into his process as well as the values expressed through his characters, that Moore personally is quite the control freak.

No, Moore is interested in ideas, big ideas, large enough to be clunky in the way, say, that a philosopher writing a novel might be clunky. The ultimate question of Watchman is just how much is permitted “for the greater good.” It’s an interesting question, given the tens of thousands our nation has caused to die of late in Iraq in the name of “democratization.” If you could end world conflict through a single terrifying act – taking out half the population in Manhattan in the process – would the deaths of millions be a “fair price to pay?”

Particularly spooky, given that Watchmen was first published in 1986-87, is not just that it envisions all this occurring with an act of terror in Manhattan (and with a pretty direct connection to Afghanistan, no less), but that – just like George, Rummy, Cheney & Wolfie – the volume ends with no vision at all as to what happens next? As in, what happens when it turns out that old habits come back and the unifying moment of pacification devolves back into the same ol’ same ol’?

The arguments one wants to make here – for example, that there is no voice anywhere in the novel for a democratic (small d) perspective – are of the order one sometimes one wants to make after seeing, say, a Philip K. Dick novella turned into a movie – think of Total Recall, whose political ideas director Paul Verhoeven once suggested were there just to make the film intellectually crunchier. Stylistically, Moore makes a modest effort at differentiating the voices of his characters – Rorschach speaks in fragments, Ozymandias is formal and condescending, the second Nite Owl stammers a lot, Laurie, the second Silk Spectre, shows some of the same rough edges her carny-dialect mother, Sally Jupiter (the first Silk Spectre) demonstrates. But much of the rest of the style, regardless of how thoroughly specified to graphic artist David Gibbons Moore may have been, largely reflects Gibbons own drawing & the coloring of John Higgins.

So Watchman & quite a few other graphic novels want to be taken seriously, but end up as fodder for B-movies while nobody suggests making films out of the far more serious novels of David Markson, Paul Auster, Carole Maso or Gilbert Sorrentino, or even a best-seller like Don DeLillo’s Underworld. To what degree are graphic novels storyboards for film projects, and to what degree not? And where, precisely, is the writing?

 

¹ This may have been Moore’s own doing. The film’s website credits the script as being “Based on the Graphic Novel Illustrated by David Lloyd.”