Reviews of Watchment: Director’s Cut, Coraline and Explicit Ills
Watchmen
Warner Bros.
Theatrical Cut: $29
2-Disc Director’s Cut: $35
Blu-ray: $36

Plot: When a retired superhero is killed, his former colleagues investigate his death and wind up stumbling upon an apocalyptic plot that may have been hatched by one of their own.

Opinion: Like every other fanboy who discovered Alan Moore’s groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen as a teenager, I anticipated and dreaded the arrival of Zack Snyder’s film version.  On the one hand, it’s hard not to geek out at the promise of seeing the comic’s beautifully drawn panels recreated so meticulously on the big screen.  At the same time though, I had enormous reservations about Snyder, whose previous film—the slow-mo-a-go-go adaptation of Frank Miller’s ultraviolent 300—was a triumph of style over substance.  I’m sorry to say that my fears were justified.  On a purely technical level, Watchmen is undeniably impressive.  The special effects are largely seamless, the production design is obsessively detailed and the characters all look like they’ve stepped right off the page onto the screen.  But as an adaptation—as well as a movie in its own right—it’s a profound disappointment.  The problem is that the filmmakers have tried to include too much of the book onscreen.  While it would have been hard to lose certain fan-favorite moments and subplots, a trimmer running time would have forced Snyder to really focus the film’s narrative, as well as find a way to make its themes relevant to modern audiences.  As it is, it’s difficult to tell what Watchmen is about…and this is coming from someone that has read the book multiple times.  This director’s cut adds 24 minutes to an already substantial runtime, but doesn’t improve the movie in any significant way.

Bonus Features: The 2-disc edition features a half-hour documentary about the impact of the graphic novel on the comic book industry and pop-culture at large as well as the 11 video journals that were posted online during the film’s production.  The Blu-ray version comes with considerably more extras, starting with a “Maximum Movie Mode” that allows viewers to watch the movie with picture-in-picture commentary from cast and crew as well as in-depth onscreen commentary from Snyder where he compares specific frames of the movie to the same frames featured in the comic book.  Also included are two additional making-of featurettes not found on the standard edition.  If you’re still hungry for more goodies after all that, you’ll have to wait for the Ultimate Collector’s Edition, a 5-disc set due to hit shelves this fall, just in time for the holiday season.

Verdict: Personally I say Skip It, but who am I kidding?  If you’re a fan of the comic, you’re obviously going to Buy It or at least Rent It.

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Coraline
Universal
$30
2-Disc: $35
Blu-ray: $40

Plot: A little girl discovers a passageway to a parallel world, which offers many delights…and a few horrors.

Opinion: Let’s cut to the chase: I love this movie.  On a technical level alone, Coraline is a stunning achievement and may just be the finest example of stop-motion animation yet put onscreen.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that you’ve never seen anything quite like the fantastical images that director Henry Selick and his team of animators have conjured up here.  From squeaky circus mice performing an elaborate song-and-dance routine, to a lush garden filled with giant snails and chatty flowers, to a seemingly ordinary room that transforms into a giant spider web, Coraline offers one dazzling setpiece after another.  It’s the very definition of movie magic—the world onscreen is so beautiful, so enveloping, so real, you feel like you’re a part of it instead of simply observing the action from your couch.  There are things about the film I could pick apart if I really wanted to—some of the vocal performances aren’t quite as strong as they could be—but none of these minor flaws can dampen my enthusiasm for what Selick has accomplished.  Coraline may look like a kids’ movie, but it’s a movie for anyone of any age who wants to experience the joy and wonder that comes with seeing a true cinematic artist at work.

Bonus Features: About 10-minutes worth of deleted scenes introduced by Selick, an in-depth half-hour making-of documentary and a featurette profiling the film’s vocal cast.  But the best bonus feature is the inclusion of both the 2D and 3D versions of the film on one disc, with a few pairs of 3D glasses tossed in as well.

Verdict: Buy It

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Explicit Ills
Peace Arch Entertainment
$30
Blu-ray: $35

Plot: A few days in the life of a run-down neighborhood in North Philadelphia, where residents are doing their best to get by.

Opinion: Although he’s never worked with critically acclaimed director David Gordon Green, actor Mark Webber has clearly studied his movies closely for his own directorial debut, Explicit Ills.  Modeled after Green’s breakthrough feature, George Washington, this stylized slice-of-life story places mood and atmosphere ahead of plot.  One area where Webber trumps Green is star power: Rosario Dawson, Naomie Harris, Paul Dano and The Roots’ Tariq Trotter are among the famous faces featured in this film’s ensemble. Thanks to the talented cast and Webber’s confident presence behind the camera, Explicit Ills is eminently watchable.  At the same time though, it’s never really all that compelling.  Instead of drawing the viewer into this community, Webber keeps us at a distance, which makes it hard to feel the full weight of the tragedy that eventually befalls the characters in the film’s final act.

Bonus Features: A batch of deleted scenes.

Verdict: Rent It

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Also on DVD:

The force is clearly with Robot Chicken.  After the success of their first Star Wars parody, Seth Green and the rest of the cast and crew of Cartoon Network’s hit stop-motion animated series return with Robot Chicken: Star Wars—Episode II (Cartoon Network, $20), which offers more hilarious Star Wars-themed sketches with a particular emphasis on the many bounty hunters (including, of course, Boba Fett) that populate that far, far away galaxy.  The disc comes with a smorgasbord of bonus features, including star-studded commentary tracks, lots of behind-the-scenes stuff and a video diary from the episode’s premiere at Skywalker Ranch.  A heartfelt tribute to the iconic crooner, who passed away just before the film was completed, Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer (RED Distribution, $30) mixes vintage archival footage with recently taped interviews with the star and her many admirers.  Although the film is accessible for all audiences, it will be best appreciated by those with a working knowledge of O’Day and the era of music she represents.  90-minutes worth of additional performances and interviews are included on the DVD.  John Malkovich won some strong reviews for his star turn in the indie comedy The Great Buck Howard (Magnolia, $27) even though the movie itself received lukewarm notices.  Only weeks before the live-action Joe hits theaters, G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: Season 1.1 (Shout! Factory, $30) packages the first season of the ’80s animated series that a generation grew up watching.  Fans of Hong Kong cinema will enjoy Dragon Dynasty’s latest offering, last year’s An Empress and The Warriors (Dragon Dynasty, $20) starring Asian superstars Donnie Yen and Leon Lai.  Turning to TV releases, all three seasons of the cult British comedy series The Mighty Boosh: Season 1, 2 and 3 (BBC America, $30 each) cross the pond offering a surreal mixture of science-fiction and fantasy humor a la The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  Stargate SG-1: Children of The Gods (MGM, $27) is a re-edited version of the pilot episode that launched the popular Stargate TV-franchise, which is still going strong on the SyFy network.  Finally, a moment of silence for two departing shows: Pushing Daises: Season Two (Warner Bros., $40) collects the final 13 episodes from ABC’s brilliant but cancelled detective show and Prison Break: The Final Break (Fox, $27) brings the exploits of expert jail-breaker Michael Schofield to a not particularly satisfying conclusion.

Dwayne’s #1!  Dwayne’s #1!

GIANT’s March cover boy Dwayne Johnson scored the fourth #1 opening of his career with this weekend’s Race to Witch Mountain, the action-packed revival of the ’70s family franchise.  It’s Johnson’s second-best start after 2002′s The Scorpion King, which opened to $36 million and $3 million ahead of his last box-office hit, 2005′s The Game Plan.  Johnson handily bested the screwed-up superheroes in Watchmen, beating out last week’s box-office champ by a solid $7 million.  The Zack Snyder directed adaptation finished second with $18 million, bringing its total gross to $86 million.  $100 million doesn’t seem out of reach, but that’s still a disappointing decline that suggests word of mouth on the film is mixed-to-negative outside of the most dedicated fanboy crowds.  The Alan Moore box office jinx continues!

Debuting in third place was the horror remake The Last House on the Left, followed closely behind by Taken (which refuses to drop out of the Top 5) and Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail.  Fox Searchlight might want to reconsider rushing their Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire onto DVD so quickly.  Although the disc is scheduled to hit stores on March 31, only two weeks away, the movie continues to print money in theaters, adding another $5 million for a $132 million total gross.

Speaking of surprise hits, there are still people out there still going to see Paul Blart: Mall Cop, as evidenced by its seventh place finish.  Like Taken, the movie has been a Top Ten list stable since January and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere soon.  He’s Just Not That Into You and Coraline finished eighth and ninth respectively, while the Playboy-themed comedy Miss March came in dead last with $2.3 million, just barely beating out Confessions of a Shopaholic.

The full list is below courtesy of the-numbers.com.  Next week should be an interesting one as three very different movies open chasing three very different audiences.  For the date movie crowd, there’s the Clive Owen/Julia Roberts romantic thriller Duplicity; for Judd Apatow slackers there’s the Paul Rudd/Jason Segal bromance I Love You, Man; and for Nic Cage fans (there are still some left, right?) there’s Knowing, a disaster movie from the guy that made The Crow.  Your guess is as good as mine as to what’s going to finish first.

The Top Ten: March 13-15
1. Race to Witch Mountain: $25
2. Watchmen: $18/$86
3. The Last House on the Left: $14.6
4. Taken: $6.7/$126.8
5. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail: $5.1/$83.2
6. Slumdog Millionaire: $5/$132.6
7. Paul Blart: Mall Cop: $3.1/$137.7
8. He’s Just Not That Into You: $2.9/$89
9. Coraline: $2.6/$69.1
10. Miss March: $2.3

For more Dwayne Johnson, click here to his GIANT photo shoot!

And for more Watchmen, click here to win “Watching The Watchmen”!

I’m sorry to say that my fears were justified.  On a purely technical level, Watchmen is undeniably impressive.  The special effects are largely seamless, the production design is obsessively detailed and the characters all look like they’ve stepped right off the page onto the screen.  But as an adaptation—as well as a movie in its own right—it’s a profound disappointment.  A complex meditation on the nature of heroism and living in the shadow of a global apocalypse, Watchmen demands a more thoughtful approach than Snyder seems willing to bring.  While the director’s passion for the book is obvious from the first frame, it’s never clear that he really understands what Moore was trying to get at when he wrote Watchmen in the mid-’80s, at the height of the Reagan era and the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

For the uninitiated, the plot kicks off with the murder of Edward Blake, who once battled evildoers as the masked hero The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).  The mysterious circumstances surrounding his death spurs one of his former colleagues, a psychopathic vigilante known as Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), to pay a visit to other ex-crimefighters, including the reclusive Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), the bodacious Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman) and her big blue boyfriend Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only hero on this alternate Earth with actual super powers.  As their investigation continues, they stumble upon a vast conspiracy with consequences that are literally apocalyptic.

Sounds like a fairly straightforward plot, but on the page, Moore employs such devices as a fractured chronology and multiple points-of-view to provide potent psychological and sociological insights into these characters and the world they inhabit.  That kind of context is largely missing from the movie, even though the screenwriters hit all of the major story points Moore laid out in the book and use much of his original dialogue with little re-writing.  The result is a movie that looks and sounds like Watchmen, but doesn’t feel much like Watchmen.  It’s clunky and plodding where the book is elegantly paced with not a single wasted moment.  The problem is that the filmmakers have tried to include too much of the book onscreen.  While it would have been hard to lose certain fan-favorite moments and subplots, a trimmer running time would have forced Snyder to really focus the film’s narrative, as well as find a way to make its themes relevant to modern audiences.  As it is, it’s difficult to tell what Watchmen is about…and this is coming from someone that has read the book multiple times.

It’s also a shame that Snyder willingly surrendered his own imagination by deciding to follow the book’s visual style so closely.  For all my complaints about his surface-level reading of Moore’s dense text, the guy is obviously creative and has a great eye for striking images.  In fact, the film’s most inspired scene doesn’t appear in the book at all—an opening credits sequence that walks viewers through an alternate history of America via a series of comic-book like tableaus.  The only other significant creative choice Snyder makes behind the camera is to carry 300‘s slow-mo heavy action sequences over into Watchmen.  But that exaggerated style doesn’t mesh well with this material; after all, the heroes of Watchmen aren’t larger-than-life Spartan warriors—they’re (mostly) ordinary people.  So seeing them scramble up the sides of buildings like Spiderman (as Rorschach does) or deliver devastating slow-motion flying kicks like something out of an old Jean-Claude Van Damme movie (as Nite Owl and Silk Specter do) comes across as vaguely absurd rather than badass.  Casting is another area where Snyder drops the ball.  While Haley is effectively creepy as the sociopathic Rorschach (although the movie makes him into more of a hero than I’m comfortable with), none of the other actrors bring a lot of personality to their roles.  Akerman and Crudup prove the biggest washouts, turning two of the book’s most interesting characters into flat, boring whiners.

Unlike some Watchmen readers—as well as Moore himself, who has repeatedly called the book unfilmable—I still think it’s possible to make a great movie out of the comic.  But doing that requires a director that doesn’t feel entirely beholden to the source material or to the fanboys that demand nothing short of devout reverence to their Holy Book.  Frankly, I would have loved to have seen the version that Paul Greengrass was preparing to direct—which was rumored to take place in a post 9/11 America—before it was scuttled at the last minute due to budget concerns.  Snyder’s version captures Watchmen‘s style, but completely misses its substance.

Verdict: The two-star rating merits a Skip It, but who am I kidding?  If you’re a fan of the comic, you’ve obviously gotta See It

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Watchmen

The movie every comic book geek thought could never be made has in fact been made.  And against the odds, it looks pretty damn awesome too.  I still have major reservations about some of the casting decisions director Zack Snyder has made with his adaptation of Alan Moore seminal graphic novel (to say nothing of the overuse of slo-mo in the trailer) but I’ve got to hand it to the guy: it looks like these characters stepped right off the pages of the comic book and onto the big screen.