The posters for Watchmen herald “the visionary director of 300,” but many of the visions in Zack Snyder’s latest directorial feat owe just as much to the efforts of production designer Alex McDowell. A veteran of projects as far reaching as Fight Club and Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, McDowell applies a deeply calculated, undeniably intellectual methodology to his projects, making him the perfect world-builder for a dense project like Watchmen. “Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore built this very realistic but stylized version of realism in the graphic novel,” McDowell says. “We looked to do the same.” In this gallery, he elaborates on his meticulous design work.

The War Room

In one of the more interesting visual embellishments on the source material, Snyder and McDowell designed a presidential war room reminiscent of the one in Dr. Strangelove. “It was actually very good that the film took so long to be made,” reasons McDowell. “There was a recontextualizing of the story with regard to everything that occurred in the past twenty years — culturally, historically, but mostly pop-culturally, so that you know now the context of Dr. Strangelove’s war in respect to contemporary history of what was going on.”

More images…

Many smart cinephiles and comic book geeks will avoid watching Watchmen this weekend. Not to avoid the crowds of opening weekend, and not to patiently await word of mouth from friends and reactions from critics. No, these bright few will ignore the out-of-season blockbuster event because there is absolutely no reason to see this movie. They recognize that any Watchmen adaptation (particularly this one that’s been made) is completely unnecessary. Well, for anyone not out to profit from it, anyway. Of course, even Warner Bros. might have been better off not producing the thing, since the studio won’t be making as much money as it had initially envisioned thanks to that profit-participation settlement with Fox.

The point of this post is not to call Watchmen watchers stupid. Rather, our list of five reasons the film is unnecessary is to help moviegoers get smart. After reading this, though, if any of you are still determined to waste your time sitting through almost 3 hours of redundant, rehashed, irrelevant, ridiculous and inescapably disappointing superhero cinema, we’ll be left with no choice but to consider you mindless sheep, the kind that deserve to be duped. And if Dr. Manhattan chooses to vaporize us (or fans choose to curse us out in the comments section) for exposing the truth about this enterprise of excess, then so be it. We believe we’ve served justice here.
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We’ve already talked about the sickly-sweet little movie that could, Slumdog Millionaire, but it’s looming Oscar domination convinced us to revisit it. This time Paul weighs in with his opinion, and draws a parallel to John Singleton’s Boyz ‘N the Hood.

Watchmen is still a month away, but the buzz is already reaching a crescendo. It’s gotten to the point where the thing to talk about is how much people are talking about Watchmen. We play a clip from an interview with director Zach Snyder, who tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to convince us he’s the man for the job.

A movie based an a self-help book based on a Sex In The City episode? Karina couldn’t resist. He’s Just Not That Into You isn’t very funny, but it does provide some insight into the inner workings of romantic comedies.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro

2:10 - Listener e-mail

6:44 - Paul’s take on Slumdog Millionaire

17:33 - Watching the Watchmen hype machine

30:24 - Karina on He’s Just Not That Into You

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Kevin Kelly covered the Watchmen press preview in Los Angeles last week, and the same footage was shown when the preview came to Manhattan yesterday. Kevin’s piece has all the nuts and bolts of what happened in the footage, so check that out if you haven’t, but since I’m fundamentally incapable of fanboy enthusiasm, I thought I ought to weigh in with just a few additional thoughts, from my ignorant/cynical perspective.

With that said… OMGITSFUCKINGAWESOME!!!!!

Just kidding. But not completely. More after the jump.

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• Fox has brought a lawsuit against Warner Brothers, claiming that the latter studio does not have the right to release Zach Snyder’s Watchmen movie, because the former studio never full gave up their rights to the property. The movie’s supposed to come out on March 6, and though a court could decide that Fox should be cut in on its eventual profits, apparently that studio would prefer if the film was shelved altogether. Why did they wait until the film was finished in order to take action? Your thoughts, please.
• Josh Brolin, Ben Affleck, Charlize Theron and Morgan Spurlock are among the celebrities expected to “either cross paths with or interface with such politicians as Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and assorted other city, state and national elected officials” at the Starz! Green Room at the Democratic National Convention next week.
• The Coen Brothers have hired “Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony-nominated actor with little experience in front of the cameras, and Richard Kind, a character actor best known for his role on ABC’s Spin City,” to star as brothers in their upcoming period comedy, A Serious Man.

Ah, accidents of synergy. Zach Snyder set the first trailer for Watchmen to a Smashing Pumpkins song called “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning.” That song, which was originally released as part of a rarities and b-sides contract fulfiller in 2005, is currently the 75th most purchased song on iTunes. Because of this Watchman-related mini-comeback could potentially give a boost to his recently-resurrected, currently recording band, Billy Corgan says he’s hoping Warner Brothers will allow him to release the trailer as a music video, even if it might go against the interest of the Pumpkins faithful (”My fans seem to be confused when the outside world appreciates our work, so I can only imagine this terrifies them,” he told the L.A. Times.)

So, yay! Good for Billy Corgan! Bring back the 90s by any means necessary, right? Well, hold on just a minute: Snyder might have used this song by accident.

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When I first went to Comic-Con, almost a decade ago, it was purely as a girlfriend. My then-love interest and I had gone to our respective home towns for the summer, and one day he called and asked for my measurements––he was making me an Uhura dress.

I understood then that part of my job at Comic-Con was partially to avoid saying anything too cynical or aggressive to his friends from back home (including the girlfriend of his best friend, who went every year in full Slave Leia regalia). But mainly, my job was to look good. I was young, and I went along with it because I was flattered that anyone would actually want to put me on display. Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, and if memory serves, I wasn’t very good at it. I am a girl of varied talents, but that summer I learned that being passive, high-concept arm candy doesn’t make use of any of them.

Which is not to say that I had a terrible time; when we got to San Diego, I ditched the boyfriend and found my own niche. I remember there being a fair number of a girlfriends, floating around at various levels of excitement or reluctance, but there were also women who were there because they were active members of one of the communities represented, either as educated consumers or as makers, or both, and across generations, they seemed to be talking to one another. My memory could be fuzzy, but I don’t remember a single booth babe. I do remember a lot of preteens in Sailor Moon suits, but that’s another matter.

But blah, blah, blah — times change. From 2000 to 2007, Comic-Con attendance tripled. Studios started to swoop in in earnest around 2001, after X-Men and the ascendancy of sites like Ain’t it Cool taught them the power of the permanent adolescent male market. As long as we’re on the subject of adolescence, if my experience at Comic-Con 2008 is any indication, the options for young girls here have, on the surface, become quite a bit more varied than the either/or between mannequin and active consumer/producer; at the same time, most of these new options seem to amount to little more than one side of that old binary split.

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One of several sponsored by Entertainment Weekly, this panel brings together four filmmakers who will be flogging their upcoming wares on other panels here this weekend: Judd Apatow (producer of Pineapple Express), Kevin Smith (Zach and Miri Make a Porno), Zach Snyder (The Watchmen) and Frank Miller (The Spirit).

According to the guide, it’ll be an evening devoted to “a free-wheeling conversation on the movie business, their upcoming projects, and what it means—to them—to be a geek.” But mostly, people are probably just anxious to get a seat for Kevin Smith’s annual stand-up comedy session, which begins in the same room immediately after, although if Frank Miller is yet aware of the drubbing The Spirit panel is getting online, things might get interesting…

Highlights:

–Judd Apatow is a) getting laid tonight, and b) has the studios by “a little bit of one ball.” But Kevin Smith, as his inspiration, can call him “bitch.”

–Kevin Smith admits to having gained weight since last year and laments that soon it will be so bad, “they’ll have to remove a wall of Comic-Con to get me out.” But he also insists he will be ready to die once he’s seen Watchmen, so that might not be an issue.

–Frank Miller is a cranky old man who doesn’t understand Google. But he’s pro web video!

–Zach Snyder gives details on the progress (or lack thereof) on a Watchmen video game, and explains why games based on movies are “not marketing, it can’t be an afterthought.”

Full transcript after the jump.

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We knew the Watchmen panel was going to be insane, but this is … insane. Packed house, hordes of people in costume, the first panel this year where masses of people were turned away.

Highlights:

–Dave Gibbons, co-creator of Watchmen, addresses the Alan Moore “elephant.”
–The extended trailer is way more hard-R than the trailer that appeared before Dark Knight. Includes a glimps of Richard Nixon and the obliteration of the Viet Cong. Shot-by-shot sum-up inside.
–There will be stuff in the film that wasn’t in the comic book.
–Real women, according to Malin Akerman, can neither kick ass nor fight crime.
–Hearing C-list stars describe what it “feels” like to make a comic book character “come to life” is exactly as boring as it sounds.

Full live blog transcript after the jump.

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