At the movies: Saw VI.

So let’s talk for a second about the Saw films. You know the drill, every Halloween there’s another one, consisting of a bunch of people put in horrible mechanisms that mutilate them unless they make difficult life choices. They’re a reactionary bunch of insidious expressions of how desperately people want to feel morally superior to anyone, and like some obligatory family member who only comes to visit once a year, I cannot avoid them.

Part of it goes with seeing all R-Rated Horror Films on general principle. But there is something more powerful than that at the root of these films that keeps me coming back every year (5 of the 6, on opening day even), and that’s tradition. I was too young (and also not a fan of scary movies) to have been in on the Friday the 13th tradition in the 80s of putting a new film out as often as could be done on an actual Friday the 13th, so this is the first tradition I’ve been able to be in on on the ground level.

That, in a nutshell, is why I keep going back to see these films. It’s not because of the characters, or the gore, or the traps, or whatever heinous moral logic is being spewed forth from within- it’s just the tradition of going every October with good friends.

Ideally, the Saw films would be better.

Even more ideally would be if the Final Destination series had that annual stranglehold. But obviously something appeals to audiences in seeing mutilation doled out to those who ‘don’t appreciate’ their lives. And this time, the filmmakers have decided to become- political. Our opening scene has two crooked loan officers from a bank forced to hack away at themselves in order not to have their skulls drilled into. The main plot for the film is about William (Peter Outerbridge, whom you may remember from Land of the Dead or the forgotten masterpiece Paris, France), an executive at an insurance agency who makes all the final calls about policies- including, at some point in the past, the policy of John Kramer (Tobin Bell, doing quite well for a character who died in Saw III). Which will end up being a bad mistake, as in as pandering a moment as I’ve seen in a film all year, Jigsaw indicts insurance companies onscreen for their actions.

Anyone can empathize with frustration over the organized racket that is the modern insurance industry. Anyone can derive some cheap kicks from watching an incarnation of a corrupt institution get shot, brain-bolted, hung with barbed wire, or having a nonconsensual run-in with hydrofluoric acid. But there's no revolutionary spirit to these films, no call to any sort of action. These are films built around the idea of submission to authority.

At this point in the series’ history, everyone who ever had lunch with Bell’s character in his life has somehow popped up in one of the sequels, strapped into something or shot in the face with a crossbow firing croquet mallets, and it feels like the Pirandellian structure that the writers have been trying to build has become a hermetic prison.

Costas Mandylor’s character from the past few sequels (Hoffman) is back, and he’s become the main villain of the piece because he enjoys brutality rather than earnestly trying to help people by pulverizing some extremities or by sticking a key or two inside their occipital lobe. He’s trying to take over the trap game from John’s widow Jill (Betsy “Angel” Russell, whom I’m happy to see working and who also embodies the closest thing to an actual moral principle in the entire series), and he’s putting our guy William against pretty much the entire staff of his insurance agency, having him cut the payroll in increasingly baroque and explicit ways.

But there’s a lot of blood to be shed this time around, and everyone has their own angle and some form of ulterior motive that was set up in a cutaway to what happened during a previous sequel.

A quick note, a lot of idiots like to bandy about the phrase ‘torture porn,’ which they’ll then use as a subgenre in which to link the Saw films with films like the Hostel diptych and I Know Who Killed Me. Firstly, anyone who uses the term ‘torture porn’ seriously is unworthy of your respect. Secondly, neither of the Hostel films nor I Know Who Killed Me deserve to be tarred with the Saw brush. While all three of those films do in fact depict violent acts of torture and murder, they (Hostel, its sequel, and I Know Who Killed Me) view the act of violence as something to be avoided, escaped from, triumphed over, or to be intervened in.

The Saw films have a torture fetish, and what they love is serving up big, Dr. Phil-sized servings of gore-spattered self-righteousness. The unspoken text of all the Saw films is “if you follow the rules and don’t ask questions and commit horrible acts against people who’ve probably got it coming, then not only are you better than your fellow man, but that you appreciate your life enough to carry about judgments against those around you.”

You are meant to support the killer Jigsaw, and you are never meant to give any thought to the countless victims of these films except as to whether or not they gave good splat. Even the situations that these films present in which some form of education takes place involves the suffering of someone innocent, and for these films to claim any form of moral respectability, which its producers have done, is both disingenuous and shameful.

So what we get here, after several detours into flashbacks and increasingly more ornate murderscapes, is a splattery lesson in how to turn the next generation of kids into fast-acting agents of death who mutilate without hesitation. Forgiveness is never an option in these films. We are animals built on avenging our losses, but never from learning from them. And that's just sad.

Supposedly Saw VII is being made in 3D. I suppose that’ll be enough of a factor to get me in the theatre on opening day 2010.

That, and tradition. But I sincerely hope I’m wrong.

At the movies: Watchmen. (warning: elliptical spoilers)

QUIS CUSTODIET CUSTODIES

I approached this film with utter dread. I’d enjoyed director Zack Snyder’s remake of Dawn of the Dead, but found his follow-up 300 as painful and expressive as a kidney stone, both ponderously ornate and incredibly stupid. So I’m being up front in the interest of journalistic objectivity when I say that I was terrified of how bad this movie might turn out. It turns out, though, that the surprise is on me, and Snyder’s film of the immortal Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel is actually kind of good. It doesn’t succeed on all fronts, and there are a few instances that clang rather than mesh, but on the whole, I’m actually impressed.

It covered all the necessary story points, it moved along breathlessly (its hundred and sixty-odd minutes pretty much flew by), and as far as presenting big budget weirdness up for the masses, it’s as subversive a mainstream film as Oliver Stone’s unfairly-maligned Alexander.

Once again, Moore has had his name kept away from the filmed version of one of his works, which in a way reasserts his authorship praeteritively. These are his characters, and yet they are not. Not completely. But Watchmen, the film, does preserve the dominant tenet of its graphic origins, using a Greco-Roman approach to divinities as its model, rather than the Marvel/DC saints. Rather than emblematic of ideals that humans should aspire to, Moore's heroes are just as flawed and screwed up (alcoholics, sociopaths, exhibitionists, and racists) as humanity is.

Unfolding in an alternate earth, circa 1985, history has played out rather differently than we know it to have done: a 1959 accident resulted in the creation of a superhuman being, codenamed Doctor Manhattan (Billy Crudup), whose near-limitless power changes outcomes and shifts global arrangements around completely. Manhattan’s cosmic power resulted in the immediate end of the Vietnam War, which led to the abolishing of term limits, which brings the film’s world into the beginning of Richard M. Nixon’s fifth term.

Two different groups of costumed adventurers, The Minutemen (circa 1940) and the Watchmen (circa 1970) provide us with the majority of our characters. Messed-up human beings with messed-up lives, these ‘masks’ were diversions for the public, locked away after the late-70s passage of the Keene act, which outlawed costumed adventurers and crimefighters. But now, someone, it seems, is killing off ‘masks,’ and the remaining survivors have to get to the bottom of a mystery that could shred the very fabric of space and time. This is the engine that gets the film going, as we follow the vigilante Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, of The Bad News Bears and Little Children) as he starts laying out the pieces of the puzzle.

The original work is one of the most seminal graphic novels ever created (though I would put the Frank Miller/Bill Sienkiewicz masterpiece Elektra: Assassin on a similar pedestal), and what makes it onscreen is an inordinate deal of what makes the Moore/Gibbons Watchmen so enduring and special: this is as morally complex a film as von Trier’s Dogville or Tolkin’s The Rapture, and anyone expecting a wham-bam superhero adventure is in for a rude and blue-phallused awakening.

Speaking of that blue phallus, let's talk for a moment about Doctor Manhattan. As far as this film is concerned, Doctor Manhattan is God. And God, busting forth with the power cosmic and the ability to create and annihilate with but a thought, is disinterested with humanity. And it's only by appropriating the ideology of good ol' American Puritanism that humanity can get its act together, which is provocative on several levels. Because it isn't the fire and brimstone dogma so many millions get drilled into their heads, but rather the illusion of that dogma that provides the fulcrum on which society, at least in this film, pivots.

And that leads to an interesting conundrum about the film: there are no regular folks. We get glimpses of the occasional regular folk (including the denizens of the newsstand), and whole craploads of them die in horrible ways, but there's no real human perspective on display here, so that's a mark against this particular adaptation. It's not an insurmountable problem, though.

Flawed as they may be, the Silk Spectre II/Nite Owl II sex scenes, bookending their rescue of what seems like an entire refugee community, get into the psychosis of the need to be a superhero in a more perceptive manner than The Dark Knight. That’s the film that will hang over everyone’s analyses of Watchmen, and it’s an unfair comparison, because The Dark Knight had Heath Ledger’s powder-keg of a Joker, and in Watchmen, the villain is human nature. The Percy Bysshe Shelley quote that adorns a statue during a climactic confrontation is a fitting one, both for our species’ tendencies toward egomania and for the way in which we hope to make a difference- to have it all matter, somehow.

So I have to say, I miss the squid, and Malin Akerman wasn’t really up for what her role called for (though the catty tone many advance reviews have taken with her performance is off-base and unfair). The whole instance of how The Comedian uncovered what he uncovered isn’t really explained at all, nor does it even really matter in the long run, which is also a problem. Jackie Earle Haley is good enough in this that it doesn’t even bother me that they’re considering him for the new Freddy Krueger. Patrick Wilson gets to play a secretly sexy nerd, and Billy Crudup has this amazing zen approach to the proceedings that for some reason make me think back to that immortal line in Almost Famous/Untitled where he proclaims “I am a golden god!” Change that adjective to cerulean, and you’ve got something.

This movie could have been a disaster of epic proportions. Instead, it’s a thematically complex pleasant surprise, and I find myself giving this take on Watchmen the highest compliment I could: it’s good enough that I forgive Zack Snyder for 300.

Why I do not wrap gifts.

There's something dishonest and cruel about wrapping presents. It represents hierarchy and process, which seems to impede the receiver and add tantalization for the giver; this is all well and good if we're talking about a relationship built on power dynamics or some S&M thrills, but it complicates things with friends and those whom you love.

This is especially the case with children. Wrapped gifts are a useful device for keeping the youth in line. They're like brightly-wrapped time-delay explosive devices that turn children into agents of espionage.

Another reason why I don't wrap gifts is because I am terrible at it. Some people have a gift for aesthetics and design and they use it in the presentation of gifts and it's gorgeous and amazing, and I just feel like an oaf in the process.

There are people who derive a great deal of joy from wrapping gifts. There are people who earn a decent seasonal income from doing it. But not me.

So there you go.