Sunday, March 8, 2009

Planted Zygote Narrative

It's been a weekend of eating ducks, bats, and a dry, curt laugh watching people funnel out of a theater.

The trailers before Watchmen, aside from that Night at the Museum crap, were pretty freakin' cool. Transformers looks like the "bad robots fuck things up, good robots stop 'em" formula from the first, but this time without any of those pesky character moments. Leave your left hemisphere at home. Say, does anyone else get really uncomfortable when folks have a very strong opinion against Shia LaBeouf? I mean, sure, he's a little geeky for the action movie roles he's in, but the sheer amount of venom folks spit about him seems a little out of proportion.

On a whole other track, the trailer for the next Harry Potter film is probably one of the best trailers I've seen in forever. It's everything I wish a trailer was: archetypal whisps of the plot, psychedelic shifts in imagery, a handfull of reaction moments to remind us of terror, quick cuts between a series of dread-inducing yet unrelated scenes with nothing given away aside from the notion that Everything's Going to Hell. Sure, we've all got it in our heads what happens in Half-Blood Prince (I fell off the wagon at Goblet, but working in a bookstore handled that just fine), yet the movie stil seems to paint this picture that we're not going to know what Unspeakable Blackness will drag through these characters. If this movie came out when I was 8 (in a magic world where we had that kind of special effects tech in the early '90s), this would have been the movie that I'd make a big fuss to see. Shit, I'm 18 years older than that and I want to see it.

The last of the trailers worth mentioning was, of course, Star Trek. Mo-Ther-Fuckers. Having watched all iterations of the damned show, even a few episodes of the epicly dull Enterprise, the preview of this movie might be the first time I've ever experienced a hard-on for the franchise. I mean, the little snippet of the space battle looked, well, exciting for once. Mmmmaybe this time someone will have the foresight to install seatbelts in the Enterprise for when "the inertial dampeners go offline" or whatever shitty line they give for the cue to flop about like a spaz.

So, here's my problem with the Watchmen: the audience. Thus far, that's my only valid gripe about the movie. If you don't mind having questions raised without any easy answers, if your emotional maturity has evolved past that of a prepubescent boy, if you can handle having no immediately discernible mustache-twirling antagonist, and if you really like good musical cues, then this movie's for you. If you're afraid of seeing penises, then maybe you'd be better off with Madea Goes to Jail.

That's that, folks.

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