Howdy, here’s a harmless fellow:
I saw Watchmen the other afternoon, it was not so great. Way gorier than I was expecting, and of course filled with the same slick Matrix-style fighting that all the action movies have these days. How can you have a scene of a dude’s arms getting sawn off – on-screen – because you’re oh so fucking grim and gritty and real life, maaan, and then in the next scene have a supposedly paunchy out-of-shape superhero dude doing slow-mo highkicks? How does that parse? Nothing about the movie felt real, even supposedly grimy streets of New York felt like candy-coated Disneyland sets.
But we watched Fritz Lang’s “M” tonight, and that was spectacular. It’s a movie about a serial killer of children, but it somehow waxes almost Dickensian in its ability to present memorable, fully-realized characters in a minimum of fuss and screen time.
Don’t ask me how a guy directing his first “talkie” back in the 30s, could stomp all over a guy with millions of dollars and the cgi to do anything in the world – but maybe that’s the problem.
