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'Watchmen': Graphic but Not Novel

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'Watchmen': Graphic but Not Novel C M Y K C11 DAILY 03-05-09 MD SU C11 CMYK The Washington Post x S Thursday, March 5, 2009 C11 BE SEEN, BE HEARD Send your listings suggestions to [email protected] or call 202-334-5477. Styleonthego» Please include a contact number. By Lavanya Ramanathan or visit www.hirshhorn.si.edu. DON’T Pioneering Philadelphia hip-hop dance WAIT! company Rennie Harris Puremovement (about which Post critic Sarah Kaufman wrote: “You felt sucked into another universe”) return March 13-14 to Atlas Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $25 through www. wpas.org or call 202-399-7993. The District Onstage A First Peek at Rising Playwrights HIRSHHORN AFTER HOURS: COURTESY OF COLIN S. JOHNSON Head to the Lincoln Theatre tonight to see five one-act plays: stagings of the winning Get tickets now for the area’s best events. scripts from the theater’s first regional Don’t call it a comeback: No Doubt has Emerging Voices Playwriting Competition. announced its first tour after a five-year Professional actors take on the roles in Large-scale hiatus, and Gwen Stefani and Co. are Michael Merino’s “Maybe”; Sharon E. photos focused coming to Nissan Pavilion on June 14. Moore’s “Line Two Is for You”; Randy Gross’s on women’s Tickets are $24.50-$80, and a “Bread”; Dean Poynor’s “Moral Support”; plight will hang recession-friendly $10 for lawn tickets. A and Amanda F. Healy’s “Firefly.” The best today only at the bonus: The band is offering a free digital part: The evening is free. Lincoln Theatre, Rayburn House download of their entire back catalogue 1215 U St. NW. Reservations are required; Office Building. with purchase of top-tier tickets (for details, call 202-328-6000 or e-mail visit www.nodoubt.com.) Tickets go on sale [email protected] BY RON HAVIV Saturday at 9 a.m. at www.livenation.com, information, visit www.lovethelincoln.com. the Nissan Pavilion box office (this Saturday only), or 877-598-8696. On sale tomorrow at 10 a.m. are seats for The District Hardship in Congo: The Big Picture Robin Williams’s May 6 and May 7 “Weapons » of Self Destruction” shows at DAR Nightlife Vixens Constitution Hall. Tickets are $65-$95 and Behaving Badly he first time Leslie Thomas curated an exhibition, it got better exposure than one might expect. Way available through Ticketmaster at Tbetter. It was projected on the side of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. 202-397-7328 or www.ticketmaster.com. The Vixen Variety Show at Palace of The last Hirshhorn After Hours was by far our Wonders tonight will feature the baddest The traveling show, “Darfur/Darfur,” brought together photojournalists’ images of the genocide in that favorite. The party returns March 27 to babes of the (local) stage, with region of Sudan at exactly the right moment, as international concern was reaching a peak. mark the Louise Bourgeois sword-dancing, side shows and burlesque. Afterward, the goal of an informal group of organizers — just “me exhibition; the artists/ They’re usually not this naughty: This Free. “Congo/Women” is open today, video artists/DJs this show, featuring Miss Joule, Belladonna noon-7 p.m., with a reception from 5-7. and the kitchen table and every friend I’ve ever had,” says Thomas, a time include Ricardo and others (many of whom bared Rayburn House Office Building Foyer, Chicago-based architect and onetime filmmaker — became the Rivera, the Klip almost all for the Obama Wonderama Independence Avenue and South Capitol full-fledged Art Works Projects. Collective and Lumia bash) is themed “Evil Super Villain Street SW. Visit www.congowomen.org. Today, the organization returns to Washington with a second Ensemble. Tickets are Show.” $10. 9 tonight. Palace $18 and will be available of Wonders, 1210 H St. NE. exhibition, “Congo/Women,” which expands the concept of using large, graphic images to address in advance only. On sale 202-398-7469 or sexual and wartime violence against women in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The show features six tomorrow. 202-633-4629 www.palaceofwonders.com. color portraits measuring 7 by 10 feet, and 32 smaller black-and-white shots by Lynsey Addario, Marcus BY STEVEN BIVER Bleasdale, Ron Haviv and James Nachtwey. It will hang at the Rayburn House Office Building today only before it moves on to a New York gallery and then a slew of college campuses. The show — co-produced by Columbia College’s institute for the study of women and gender — has a more specific target than its predecessor: It’s meant for lawmakers. “We’re big on big,” Thomas says. “Big and out there, and right in your face.” FIND THINGS TO DO 24-7 ON THE WASHINGTON POST’S GOING OUT GUIDE FOR MORE THINGS TO DO, SEE TODAY’S EXTRA ‘Watchmen’: Graphic but Not Novel MOVIES, From Page C1 When it first appeared, “Watchmen” was hailed as a revolution in comic-book artistry. It was dark and ironic, a wry speculation on what the “real life” of superheroes might be like, set in a dysto- pian 1985, during the constitutionally extended presidency of Richard Nixon. It was two books in one, a look at the twisted, tortured, sexually kinky un- derworld of vigilantes who like to fight crime in costumes grafted onto an ordi- nary, race-against-the-doomsday-clock tale of pugilistic heroes and arch-vil- lains. It deflated the very form it cele- brated. But it was ambitious in its storytell- ing, filled with flashbacks, subplots, and WARNER BROS. PICTURES obscure strands of narrative slowly wo- ven together over 12 serial installments. The graphic design, by Gibbons, was Despite the intellectual name-drop- Director Zack even though Richard Nixon is still presi- manically detailed, hyperkinetic and ping, the quotes from Nietzsche, Blake Synder dent on the fictional timeline of “Watch- worked out with the precision of a movie and Juvenal (“Who watches the watch- reproduces the men, ” the novel is very much a reflec- storyboard. The novel was cultlike in its men?”), the level of Moore’s writing almost tion on Reagan’s bellicose anti-Soviet appeal, a little illicit, always alluding to rarely rises above B-movie fare. It is silly subliminal rhetoric, and the sense (among his crit- its own profundity, hinting at secrets, and dated, the faded gibberish of an old- symbols and ics) that he had turned his back on the drawing you deeper into its self-con- fashioned noire stylist (the kind who exact poor and unfortunate. The crack epi- sciously metaphysical world. now works for newspapers). And it is perspectives of demic was in full swing, AIDS a looming This was catnip for the fanboys, who filled with cliches. the original disaster, and the urban revival of the can be as snobbish about their comics as “We’re all puppets,” says the God-like artwork. Above, 1990s was years off. New York could wine lovers or opera geeks are about Dr. Manhattan, the mysterious hero Jackie Earle break your heart during the “Watch- their fetishes. And it attracted critics ea- who looks like a blue version of Mr. Haley as men” years. ger to find genius in the dark corners of Clean. “I’m just a puppet who can see the Rorshach in the Some of that detail is dealt with in the American pop culture. Time magazine strings.” movie; left, a opening scenes, a brilliant, fast-paced declared it one of the 100 Best English- Ouch. frame from the tour through Moore’s alternate version language Novels since 1923, in the same Over the years, multiple efforts to film graphic novel by of American history. This was the nov- league with Faulkner, Orwell and Hem- “Watchmen” have failed. Terry Gilliam, writer Alan el’s great strength — an imagined ingway. The academically inclined found director of “Brazil,” was engaged with Moore and artist world, rich in detail, familiar but alien at it a brilliant deconstruction of the super- the project for a while, but that fell Dave Gibbons. the same time. When the movie lingers hero myth, multivalent, polysemic, through. Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne BY DAVE GIBBONS there, it entertains. densely imbricated and all that jazz. Ultimatum”) worked on a version that But when it marches in lockstep with Which was pure hooey. “Watchmen” updated the story from its Cold War set- Moore’s tedious plot and recapitulates was fun, but also incredibly pretentious ting to the War on Terror, but that didn’t The actors do what they can. Crudup of- gave the original novel a cool sense of the leaden back and forth of his card- — a word that hardly applies anymore go far either. All of which led to the farci- fers a certain daffy detachment as Dr. layers and randomness. But given the board characters, the only watch that to high culture, but sure comes in handy cal notion that “Watchmen” was un- Manhattan, who was once a scientist but movie’s excessive length, nothing lost is matters in “Watchmen” is the one on when dealing with pop culture’s more filmable. now, thanks to the sort of high-tech mis- really lamented. The most significant your wrist. It’s telling you life is too desperate efforts to be taken seriously. Proust is unfilmable. “Das Kapital” is hap that is distressingly commonplace change between the movie and the novel short for this movie. By treating the original text as a sacred unfilmable. “Watchmen” is not unfil- in comic books, a shape-shifting, tele- is the density and immediacy of the vio- document, the movie is laughably pre- mable.
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