Weekend Movie Forecast: <em>Watchmen</em> Vs. Frenchmen
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<p>There's a fairly wide spectrum of opinion on <em>Watchmen</em>, Zack Snyder's big budget movie adaptation of Alan Moore's post-superhero graphic novel. Fanboys <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2009/02/watchmen_whore.php">have rhapsodized</a>, film bloggers <a href="http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2009/03/6-redunant-but-real-reasons-why.html">have sneered</a>, mainstream movie critics have <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/movies/06Watc.html?ref=movies">shrugged</a>, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2009/03/09/090309crci_cinema_lane">eviscerated</a>, and <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-04/film/zack-snyder-didn-t-ruin-watchmen/">tentatively endorsed</a>. Who to believe? Gothamist, naturally! We squeezed into an absurdly crowded all-media preview at AMC Loews Lincoln Square on Tuesday and walked away underwhelmed. While there are some stunning sequences, and Moore's sturdy narrative structure keeps boredom at bay, the overwrought tone of nihilistic despair, coupled with mostly lackluster performancesâJackie Earle Haley's Rorschach being the brilliant exceptionâleft us feeling oppressed and alienated. Premise: People suck, and the only way they'll learn is through mass annihilation. Twelve dollars, please! </p><p></p>Also, the movie features some of the weirdest soundtrack choices in recent memory, from "The Times They Are A-Changin'" to "Sounds of Silence" to, um, a superhero sex scene set to Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". (Though a section of Brahms's "Ein Deutsches Requiem" somehow succeeded.) To be fair, the media screening was, irritatingly, <em>not</em> in IMAX, and if you're a fan of the graphic novel, chances are you'll be satisfied with a <a href="http://gothamist.com/2009/01/30/dark_knight_is_back_in_imax_but_not.php">giant screen viewing at Lincoln Square</a>; that 80-foot high screen has the potential to make even the adequate seem transcendent.
<p>The 14th edition of the Film Society of Lincoln Centerâs <a href="http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/rendezvous09/program.html">Rendez-Vous With French Cinema</a> series kicked off this week. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/movies/27rend.html">Stephen Holden at the Times</a> has a fairly thorough essay on the seriesâs 18 films; seen above is <em>Séraphine</em>, which screens tonight and Sunday. Directed by Martin Provost, the biopic concerns Séraphine de Senlis, a WWI-era French painter toiled as a housekeeper until her work was discovered and championed by her boss, German art collector Wilhelm Uhde. The movie stars Yolande Moreau, "an actress for whom there is no American equivalent," according to Holden.</p>
<p>Russian actor/director Nikita Mikhalkov's <em>12</em> is a reworking of Sidney Lumet's classic courtroom pot boiler <em>12 Angry Men, </em>set in post-communist Moscow, where the jury deliberates over the fate of a Chechen youth accused of murdering his adoptive father, a Russian officer. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-04/film/12-remakes-12-angry-men-in-russia/">The Village Voice's Michelle Orange</a> calls it <strong>"masterful, engrossing</strong>... Miklahkov keeps 12 tops spinning at all times in the school gymnasium that serves as their deliberation room, and though the speech/conversion pattern grows a little pat, the movement toward consensus raises the further, richly complicated question of how to decide not only what is right, but what is best."</p>
<em>Everlasting Moments</em>, from Swedish director Jan Troell, concerns a woman who experiences an artistic awakening after being introduced to photography around the turn of the century. A.O. Scott at the Times <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/movies/06ever.html">has respect</a>: "Quiet and decorous though it is, <em>Everlasting Moments</em> is as full of character and incident as a fat realist novel... There is sorrow and brutality in this film, but it is balanced by delicacy, humor and a sense of innocence that flirts with mawkishness. Any excursion into a lost world of childhood... risks sentimentalizing the past, but Mr. Troell, many of whose earlier films have also been historical dramas, compensates with a sense of historical and psychological clarity. <strong>The result is an experience that, even as it feels a bit familiar, is nonetheless engrossing and satisfying."</strong>
<em>Tokyo!</em> (in Japanese with English subtitles) consists of three surreal short films: Michel Gondryâs <em>Interior Design</em>, Leos Caraxâs <em>Merde</em> and Bong Joon-Hoâs <em>Shaking Tokyo</em>. We were <em>supposed</em> to interview Gondry about the project last week, but when <a href="http://screenrant.com/michael-gondry-talks-direct-green-hornet-sabrina-5709/">news leaked</a> of his involvement with <em>The Green Hornet</em>, his publicist went to DEFCON 1 and, besides demanding that no "Green Hornet" questions be asked, insisted that any interview also include Joon-Ho. So that's how the sausage doesn't get made, readers. Anyway, <a href="http://www.observer.com/2009/movies/tokyo-calling">the Observer's Andrew Sarris</a> reflects a generally favorable critical consensus: "All three pieces contain surreal elements that convey the endless tumult and impermanence of a metropolis that, unlike the other great cities of the world, is constantly changing in the steady swirl of humanity and neon... <strong>The cumulative strangeness of <em>Tokyo!</em> is consistent with the previous eccentricities of the three directors, and is well worth the time of any moviegoer looking for something different in their movie diet."</strong>
<em>Frontier of Dawn</em>, the new film from talented but largely ignored post-New Wave French director Philippe Garrel, focuses on a young photographer, François (Louis Garrel, the filmmakerâs son), and the two women with whom he finds and loses love. Shot in gorgeous high-contrast black and white, the movie is, <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/movies/06dawn.html?ref=movies">according to the Times's Manohla Dargis</a>, a "fatalistic romance." She means that as a compliment: "Itâs a lovely work, suffused with a deep melancholy that seems etched into each of its beautifully lighted images... <strong>[Garrel] transforms a private reverie into a public sacrament, invokes the eternal, risks absurdity, invites derision, seduces, shocks, transcends."</strong>
<p>In his youth, director Mark Webber squatted in punk squalor in Philadelphia for a while, so it makes sense his film <em>Explicit Ills</em>, a slice of life on the fringe in the city of brotherly love, sports a left-wing agenda. Produced by Jim Jarmusch, it's also got some noteworthy names in the cast, including Paul Dano and Rosario Dawson, who plays the working-class mother of a young asthmatic. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-04/film/explicit-ills-more-sweet-tempered-than-preachy/">Aaron Hillis at the Voice</a> calls it "confidently polished and thankfully more sweet-tempered than preachy, given that every narrative thread has an underlying theme of social injustice. As it leads up to a neighborhood-wide rally that brings every character together, it's a shame that Webber (in a marching cameo) has already surrendered his drama over to a last-act tragedy (poverty's fault, of course). For that, I, too, protest."</p>
<p>Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister, stars in <em>Phoebe in Wonderland</em>, about a troubled 9-year-old whose only friend is an equally persecuted boy who collects dolls. Together, they both find a home in a school production of <em>Alice in Wonderland.</em> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/phoebe-in-wonderland,1149177.html">The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan</a> says, "Ultimately, it gets bogged down in its own earnestness and made-for-TV melodrama... As the title character, the young actress shines... Which makes it all the more disappointing that the material she has to work with is so lackluster."</p>
<p>For one week only, <a href="http://www.filmforum.org/films/leave.html">Film Forum is screening</a> John Stahl's 1945 "film noir in color" <em>Leave Her to Heaven</em>, which stars Gene Tierney in an Oscar-nominated performance as the irresistible femme fatale. <a href="http://www.timeout.com/film/newyork/reviews/80241/leave-her-to-heaven.html">Time Out NY calls it</a> a "masterpiece of post-WWII American cinema... The glamour of the filmâs palette (courtesy of cinematographer Leon Shamroy) is but a bandage on a festering canker, and a late courtroom scene in which Ellenâs former fiancé (Vincent Price) interrogates the filmâs surviving parties seems more a Torquemada-like spiritual purge than a crusading search for justice. If God is in the details, he remains tauntingly at the margins: Blue skies never seemed so coldly distant and on-high critical, especially in the deceptively redeeming final shot, one of the few compositions captured, tellingly, from an emphatic low angle."</p>
<p>This weekend <a href="http://www.landmarktheatres.com/Films/films_frameset.asp?id=63330">at midnight the Sunshine</a> screens <a href="http://www.teethmovie.com"><em>Teeth</em></a>, about an innocent tween named Dawn who discovers she has a "toothed vagina" when she becomes the object of violence. 'Nuff said.</p>
<p>IFC Waverly Midnight's "<a href="http://www.ifccenter.com/event?eventid=999852">Cronenberg Classics</a>" series continues this weekend with the 1999 film <em>eXistenZ</em>, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, and Willem DaFoe in a sci-fi metaphysical thriller about a virtual reality game's very bad beta-testing.</p>