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1. Watchmen works! It’s loyal to the comics but won’t alienate non-readers. More importantly it’s not an expensively-animated storyboard, it’s a crazy spectacle. We are disturbed and unsettled, and We Like It.

2. The actors’ resemblance to their graphic equivalents is uncanny: they seem to have walked out of the pages. (Except Matthew Goode, see below.)

3. After the opening scenes we’re guessing director Zack Snyder was strapped down and restrained from having all the action rendered in slow-motion. Excellent decision, or the movie would’ve run four hours instead of two hours, forty minutes.

4. Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre II looks good but her delivery is robotic. Not her fault though that her fight scenes are like shampoo commercials. Billy Crudup as the anatomically-correct Dr. Manhattan has the worst gig on earth playing a character who has lost touch with his humanity. And yet he is operatically emotional compared to Matthew Goode, who plays Veidt as a marionette. Jeffrey Dean Morgan makes an oddly touching (for a total scumbag) Comedian and Carla Gugino’s Sally is a great old broad. Patrick Wilson is exactly how we imagined Dan Dreiberg. Jackie Earle Haley turns Rorschach into a figure out of Greek tragedy, and we hardly even see his face. He is the festering soul of this tale.

5. The movie is loud enough, but it gets deafening when there’s music on the soundtrack. We know the rights to the Dylan, Hendrix, Cohen etc recordings are expensive, but you don’t have to blow out our eardrums to get your money’s worth.

6. Ah, there’s the reason we don’t get to see the iMax version in the Philippines: the sex scene has noticeable cuts. We don’t really mind as the scene is cheesy, hilarious, and goes on too long. Hmm, there’s constant carnage in this movie—cleavers to the head, limbs spurting blood, bones breaking, bodies exploding, boiling fat on human flesh. Apparently violence is acceptable, but sex is verboten.

7. Trying to make a spoiler not a spoiler: the mass devastation is less squishy than we’d anticipated.

8. The movie is true to its uncredited creator’s vision. It turns the superhero genre inside out (often literally). There is no triumphalism, no saving the day, just bitterness, regret, self-loathing, corrosion and dark irony. It’s a downer, and it’s just what we wanted.

The Simpsons: Always anti-reverence.

An hour before the movie we heard the news that Francis Magalona had died. (Weird how the Eraserheads reunion concerts are preceded by wakes. First Ely’s mother, and now the band’s great friend and colleague.) We knew he was very ill, but we assumed he would recover. We grieve for Francis and his family, for all of us and for the music we’ve lost.

Screen grab from The Leopard: The Prince and his family have a picnic.

We haven’t seen any posters or trailers for Slumdog Millionaire. Will it be shown in Manila at all? (You can watch whatever you like; I prefer to see movies on a screen at least 20 feet high.) Naturally this set off another conspiracy theory (compounded by disgruntlement because the only movie that opened in my neighborhood yesterday was the Jonas Brothers Concert Experience): distributors won’t show it here because they perceive Pinoys as racists who will not watch a movie about “Bumbay” (The local word for Indian, derived from Bombay/Mumbai. The notion of race itself is racist; as my dictionary puts it, “Scientifically it is accepted as obvious that there are subdivisions of the human species, but it is also clear that genetic variation between individuals of the same race can be as great as that between members of different races.”)

So much for conspiracy theories: Turns out Slumdog opens in Manila in late April. The word is that there are no available prints as its theatrical run in the US was extended. (They can’t make more prints for a hit?)

Salman Rushdie recently drew a lot of flak, which must’ve been his intention, with his disparaging comments on outright dismissal of Slumdog Millionaire. Not content with having incensed fans of Danny Boyle’s very popular movie, Rushdie now takes on ALL film adaptations in this essay in the Guardian. You have to hand it to the object of the long fatwa from the Ayatollah Khomeini: he has no fear of being disliked. Say what you will about his possible motives—territoriality (India is his), envy (Where’s the movie of Midnight’s Children?), publicity-seeking—he throws down a strong argument. Plus he gets readers interested in half-forgotten works: I’m now looking for Jan Potocki’s The Manuscript Found At Saragossa.

Film adaptations Salman Rushdie approves of:
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, filmed by Peter Jackson (Rushdie says the movies are better; no doubt Tolkienites will have their say)
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, filmed by the Coen Brothers
Oil! by Upton Sinclair, filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson as There Will Be Blood
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, filmed by Luchino Visconti
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, filmed by Volker Schlondorff
Contempt by Alberto Moravia, filmed by Jean-Luc Godard
Jules and Jim by Henri-Pierre Roché, filmed by Francois Truffaut
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, filmed by Martin Scorsese
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, filmed by John Huston
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, filmed by David Lean

In his Front Row blog Richard Brody notes that Godard’s Masculin-Feminin was adapted from two stories by Maupassant. When the finished movie was screened for the copyright owner, he found the material unrecognizable so no credit was necessary. I’m pretty sure that brilliant scene in which Jean-Pierre Leaud makes a recording for his girlfriend does not appear in Maupassant.

This email from Daniel was sent to my column.

“Quite recently while I was rummaging through my grandfather’s stuff, I came across 30 or so vinyl records from the 1920s. They were in good shape considering that most of them were nearly 90 years old. The artists were all local singing those songs we hear in Rogelio dela Rosa movies. Do you know of anybody who might be interested in such records? My former classmate at UP told me to donate the collection to the UP College of Music, which my lolo would probably appreciate, being an alumnus of UP. Do you know who I can contact for the donation?”

Anyone?

Kermit wishes to point out that records from the Twenties are shellac, not vinyl, which was invented later. 78 rpm records are shellac, 33 rpm LPs (“long-playing”) are vinyl.

Alan Moore photograph by John Robertson

Alan Moore will have nothing to do with the movie version of Watchmen. He doesn’t want his name on it, and he gave his share of the money to Dave Gibbons. He also refused credit on the adaptations of From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Very wise decision).

Standing more than six feet tall, Moore has the flashing eyes and floating hair of the malign presence in Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. An unsung British creative giant, with a flat Black Country accent, he looks more like a shadowy character from one of his own cult comics than a mighty creator of worlds. He wears silver, scorpion rings, has a penchant for magic, tarot cards and erotica and is rumoured to worship a Roman snake god. Yet this unlikely bloke, whose recent Lost Girls was a kinky comic strip fantasy about the sexual awakening of three young girls in the Austria of 1913, has somehow perpetrated the ultimate swindle on American popular culture.

As novelist and Watchmen fan Susanna Clarke puts it: “He took something very American – the superhero comic – reinvented it [more than once] and sold it back to them.”

Alan Moore profiled in the Observer.

In case you skipped Monday’s post, I’m sorry to have to break the news to you: Watchmen will not be shown at the iMax theatre in Manila. I tried to reserve tickets at iMax and they said the screenings were off so I called the distributor UIP to ask why. I was told there is no available iMax print for Manila. Thought it was because we’re not a major iMax market. Then one of the fanboys heard that there was a censorship problem leading to the cancellation. The MTRCB rates movies (GP, PG, R-13, R-18) but can’t order cuts. Some distributors want their product to be available to a wider audience, so they censor their own movies. The iMax print couldn’t be chopped. Then the SM cinemas don’t allow R-18 movies, and iMax is at SM Maul of Asia.

The upshot of all this idle speculation is, you’ll have to catch Watchmen at a regular theatre.

On the other hand the Star-Viva movie You Changed My Life is racking up Spider-Man type grosses, said some industry people I saw recently. So Pinoys still flock to the movies, but maybe not to iMax movies. Maybe if Sarah and John Lloyd were Silk Spectre and Nite Owl…Alright, alright, I’ll wash my keyboard out with soap.

People holding video cameras. People toting boom mikes. The studio is full of journalists and filmmakers. They’re documenting rehearsals for the Eraserheads concert on Saturday, March 7.

This is the last one. The band is not getting back together. Saturday’s show is take two of the reunion concert last year that was interrupted when Ely faded out during the intermission. If you’re a fan, here’s your chance at closure.

Marcus Adoro looks exactly the same. The only movie-worthy episode in my band career starred Marcus and a small piece of paper.

Ely Buendia with filmmaker Roxlee painter Romeo Lee. Naturally Ely looks younger than he did in the Nineties when the Eheads were playing together. The ticker problem forced him into a change of lifestyle, a healthy diet, tons of vitamins.

But how do you account for the youthfulness of Raymund Marasigan?

Or the fact that Buddy Zabala circa 2009 looks like Buddy Zabala, library science major circa 1992?

“How can you look younger than you did in 1998?” I asked them. “Is being apart your beauty secret?” They laughed.

Maybe if I’d had cats in 1997 I might’ve lasted more than four months as band manager. Koosi adopted me in 1999. She still looks like a large kitten.

Cruise, Hutton, Penn. Photos from Rolling Stone’s The Essential Sean Penn

Back in the Paleozoic when there were stand-alone movie theatres where people actually watched movies, my best friend dragged me to the old Circle Theatre on Quezon Avenue to watch a movie called Taps. We may have cut class. Gail had a crush on Timothy Hutton. The movie was alright; all I remember is that it ends tragically, and it was the first time we saw Sean Penn. We did not have a crush on him. His nose was too big for his face (he’s grown into it since), he was not dreamy like Timothy Hutton or cute like his wee beady-eyed costar, what’s-his-name, Tom Cruise. However, we had a sense that Penn was going to be something someday. We’re seldom wrong about these things.

Sean Penn got his first Oscar for Mystic River, in which he plays an ex-con whose daughter is murdered. He was brilliant, Method-y, always on the verge of overreaching, but it worked. In Milk he just disappears into the character. (We were half-rooting for Mickey Rourke. Whenever I see someone carrying a chihuahua I feel like saying, “Loki! You’ve come baack!”)

The role that sealed our loyalty to Sean Penn forever, through marriage to Madonna, brawls with the press, obnoxious behavior and dabbling in politics: Jeff Spicoli the stoned surfer in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

Saw it again recently. Keanu Reeves owes his acting. . .his movie career to Sean Penn: his breakthrough role as Ted in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is a pale ripoff of Spicoli. Gnarly.

Three Best Actor winners appear in Fast Times: Sean, Forrest Whitaker as the scary football star, and Nicolas Cage, who then went by his real name Coppola, as a fastfood counter guy. Fast Times is one of those movies that perfectly captures a slice of the zeitgeist. I approve of any movie in which I hear We Got the Beat by the Go-Gos, American Girl by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Somebody’s Baby by Jackson Browne in quick succession.

Fast Times also starred Jennifer Jason Leigh and Phoebe Cates. Jennifer Jason Leigh has had some killer performances; she should do more movies. The last one I’m aware of is Margot At The Wedding by Noah Baumbach, her husband. Phoebe Cates today looks pretty much the way she did when her poster adorned half the jeepneys in Manila. Fast Times was written by Cameron Crowe (He made his directorial debut some years later with Say Anything, the movie that defined the perfect guy for my generation) and directed by Amy Heckerling. She’s had an interesting career: era-defining pieces like Fast Times and Clueless, crap like Look Who’s Talking Too. I wanted to see her most recent movie I Could Never Be Your Woman, but it closed before I got to the mall. At least it was shown here; elsewhere it went straight to DVD.