Watchmen getting lousy reviews...

Here's one from the Telegraph:
There is, we keep being told by those whose juices fail to flow at the prospect of Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston stroking their dog in Marley and Me, no film more eagerly awaited in 2009 than Watchmen. It¹s hard to know why. Director Zack Snyder had box-office tills ringing with his blood-soaked, muscle-brained treatment of Frank Miller¹s graphic novel 300. What chance, though, does he have of making Alan Moore¹s 1986 12-part comic come to life when it has already stymied the likes of Terry Gilliam, Darren Aronofsky and Paul Greengrass?

³My book is a comic book. Not a movie. It¹s been made in a certain way, and designed to be read in a certain way: in an armchair, nice and cosy next to a fire, with a steaming cup of coffee.²
Cosy is one way of putting it. Set in a 1985 in which Richard Nixon is still in power and on the verge of going to nuclear war with the Soviet Union, Watchmen presents a paranoid dystopia in which even the superheroes are flailing and impotent.It¹s also a whodunnit. A guy called Edward Blake (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), formerly a thuggish vigilante known as Comedian, is thrown off the top of a New York building. His fall is aesthetically striking, and ­ to one of his old associates, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a borderline-sociopath whose face is covered by bandages across which black inkblots float and drift ­ deeply disturbing. Soon, a bunch of Comedian¹s old chums re-emerge: Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), an angsty tech-whizz; Adrian Veidt, formerly Ozymandias (Brideshead Revisited¹s Matthew Goode), a smug and quasi-Aryan über-businessman; Laurie Jupiter, or Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), bursting with busty appeal.

Most ­ and literally biggest ­ of all, there¹s Laurie¹s boyfriend Jon Osterman, or Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a scientist transformed by a radiation accident into a blue supra-human who was used by Nixon to bring the Viet Cong to its knees.

It becomes clear that a plan exists, though it¹s unclear who is orchestrating it, to destroy the planet. Part of the plan involves getting rid of the Watchmen: Rorschach is slung in jail for a crime he didn¹t commit; Dr Manhattan is plunged into such emotional despair that he exiles himself on Mars. The screenplay, by David Hayter and Alex Tse, does a good job at retaining the teeming, interlinked, hyper-allusive strands of the original comic book without losing complete track of structure and coherence. It portrays, with convincing apocalyptic dread, mid-Eighties New York both in generic terms (the engloomed, rain-lashed city so darkly beloved of pulp novelists) and with a sociological edge (in economic freefall, its streets full of knife-wielding criminals).

And yet, although global annihilation in the offing, Snyder is so besotted with Moore¹s book that he feels he has to include almost every detail. He dawdles interminably. Slow pans, slow tilts, slo-mo: there¹s simply not enough kick or energy to justify the 160-minute running time.

There are lighter touches: Leonard Cohen¹s Hallelujah is heard during a deliberately overripe sex scene between Clark Kent and Lois Lane ­ er, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. But Snyder, who walked the thin line between camp and psychotic so adroitly in 300, fails to calibrate ambience as effectively here. He loves his violence, of course. Choice scenes include women¹s heads slammed against pool tables, a pregnant woman shot at close range, boiling oil hurled over a human face, a meat cleaver hacking a paedophile¹s skull, dogs dismembering and chewing an abused girl.
³What has happened to us? What has happened to the American dream?² a character asks. The answer might be: ³You, Zack Snyder. Man-boy directors, blessed with skill but no soul, content to peddle enervatingly reverential treatments of soft porn for kidults.²

You will not be surprised to learn that American Teen, by documentarian Nanette Burstein, is a film about American teens. What is surprising, though, is that Burstein decided to make it. American teenagers are hardly invisible or inaudible today ­ either at movie theatres or in our culture at large. They¹re the target demographic for a dismayingly large percentage of commercial releases. Watchmen, for instance. Sitcoms, pop music, the internet: through these media forms, all of them with a reach that extends well beyond the US, the tastes and values of American teenagers end up getting normalised.
In spite, or possibly because of this, it¹s understandable if some filmmakers try and find ³real² American teenagers in order to expose the gulf between their lives and the kinds of narratives constructed about them by the entertainment industry.
Burstein, whose previous films include The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) about Hollywood producer Robert Evans, knows a good deal about that latter topic. The five high-schoolers, 17 years old and on the brink of leaving for college or the labour market, live in Warsaw, Indiana. They¹re all white, a detail that speaks volumes about the racial assumptions that underpin the popular image of an American teenager. Some are wealthier than others: Megan, assertively confident, expects to go to her family¹s alma mater, the University of Notre Dame; Colin, by contrast, can only afford his tuition fees if he wins a basketball scholarship.
Burstein unobtrusively and sympathetically tracks these youngsters as they do all the things that people their age do: worry about their hair, make out in swimming pools, deface other students¹ homes, use the word ³suck² every two sentences. Hannah dreams of working in the movies. Introverted Jake plays video games a lot.
The existence of a world beyond that of their suburban homes arises only when one of them talks about not wishing to join the army. Burstein jollies up the fly-on-the-wall TV-realisms with split screens, text messages and Facebook-like scripts, and gothic animation sequences dramatising the traumas her subjects talk about.
I didn¹t dislike any of them. But, even by the standards of late adolescence, they come across as incredibly self-absorbed. Their speech patterns and thought processes seem no different from, and may even be mimicking unconsciously, those of teenagers in Hollywood movies. Perhaps that is Burstein¹s anthropological (and depressing) point: there is no authentic identity left for American teenagers ­ or American directors ­ to explore.

You don't write to be understood, you write to understand yourself. Martin Deschamps