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Under discussion:

Star Wars [Film Series]  (1977)

Pirates of the Caribbean [Film Series]  Production Year

Transformers  (2007)

Watchmen  (2009)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen  (2009)

One thing you have to love about the fanboys, they’re always a glass-half-full kind of people. Whenever one of their beloved movies gets ripped apart by critics, they point to the box office results with pride. Critics are meaningless, they remind us, because Transformers and the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels and the Star Wars prequels made so much money. And now, with their Watchmen having received both mixed reviews and a relatively disappointing opening weekend, they’re still defending its success to the end. Drew McWeeny of HitFix said it best in a Tweet this morning: “Box-office talk is absolute death to me. I just don’t care. It got made. I liked it. I win.”

McWeeny may not exactly be the king of the geeks, but he does inadvertently represent them today. Because whether or not Watchmen has technically underperformed (or “failed” in any way) should not be their concern any more than the negative reviews (or our list of reasons claiming the comic adaptation is unnecessary). But if they are going to use the defense that the box office doesn’t matter, they aren’t allowed to celebrate grosses this summer when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen receives bad reviews yet still has a strong opening.

More on the debate on the topic of Watchmen’s success or failure after the jump.

Glass Half-Full:

• Eugene Novikov of Cinematical lays out the good (and the bad, see below):
  

  I think comic book geeks and other well-read folks who revere the graphic novel — and rightfully so — forget that Watchmen is not a brand name in the world at large. And it’s 163 minutes long. And it’s rated R (and I’ve heard some anecdotal evidence that some theaters were going out of their way to exclude the underage and unaccompanied). So we’re not exactly talking about Spider-Man 3, here.

• “It did fare pretty well,” argues Alex Billington of FirstShowing.net, “and has caused quite a bit of commotion.”
• “A certified success — despite clocking in with lower-than-desired numbers,” claims Casey Seijas at Splash Page.
• Jeff Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere as usual claims no dog in the race, but he does seem more on the optimistic, half-good side: “I really do think $57 million isn’t half bad.”
• Radar’s headline: “Watchmen Wins Weekend By Landslide. In addition, they point to all the sold out IMAX shows.
• “For the die hard fans,” writes Rodney at The Movie Blog, “it isn’t about the numbers this movie rings in on the registers, but a momentous moment that the movie is finally released.”
• Scott Mendelson at The Huffington Post puts the gross into a positive perspective:
  

  Watchmen, based on a comic book that only the hardcore had even heard of, had a bigger three-day weekend than Superman Returns. It had a bigger three-day weekend than Batman Begins. Heck, Watchmen has the second biggest DC Comics three-day opening weekend of all time, behind (obviously) The Dark Knight.

• Mark Graham at Vulture thinks the leaked video of Watchmen’s opening credits sequence could be good for the film’s second weekend:
  

  We’re pretty sure that this visually striking sequence is the best marketing tool that’s available to Warner Bros. at this point; if they decided to officially release and heavily promote this video over the course of this week, you can bet that it would pique the interest of droves of non-fanboy types who avoided the film on its opening weekend.

• Brian Jacks at MTV Movies Blog points out that if the movie doesn’t get a sequel, it’s at least not because of how the movie opened.
• Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neil spins positively with mention of the tech achievements from the Watchmen crew that could get the film kudos from the Oscars, MTV Movie Awards, People’s Choice Awards, Teen Choice Awards, Saturn Awards and respective guild honors.

Glass Half-Empty:

• Cinematical’s Eugene Novikov with the other side of the coin:
  

  Watchmen did take a fairly massive Friday-to-Saturday-to-Sunday tumble, which is admittedly worrisome. And having seen the film I’m pretty confident that word of mouth will not carry it along. Not because it’s bad, necessarily, but because it’s not particularly “crowd-pleasing,” and rather inaccessible to the uninitiated.

• “The film certainly didn’t ‘bomb’ in the conventional sense, but given the hype, it did fall somewhat short,” writes G4’s Joseph Baxter, who gives his theory for why it underperformed.
• Vulture’s Lane Brown isn’t sure if it’s a hit or not, but he does wonder, “While Watchmen’s gross is pretty huge considering its bleak worldview, geeky source material, and three-hour running time, if a movie like The Dark Knight can do $160 million in a weekend, then why couldn’t this one have made a little bit more?”
• John Cairns at Film School Rejects has a perspective to combat Mendelson’s positive spin: “For all the hype and buzz, the opening weekend haul was really no better than what The Incredible Hulk pulled in last year.
• More negative perspective from Leremy Legel at RopeofSilicon.com:
  

  It opened below Twilight and Fantastic Four. No bueno. It’s going to have to scramble to hit $200m domestically and the darker fare doesn’t usually attract international audiences as well. Take Dark Knight for instance. It only made $15m in Japan, where Spider-Man cleared $50m.

• Steven Zeitchik at Risky Biz Blog weighs in on “the day after”:
  

  When is a solid opening still a disappointment? When it comes attached to “Watchmen.” After the legal battles, the fanboy hype and the boxoffice hopes, the pic came in with a $55 million opening — pretty decent for an R-rated March movie … but not that decent when you consider nothing opened against it and it was on 3,600 bloody screens.

• “It was supposed to be the biggest movie ever,” notes Richard at Gawker. “Surely Watchmen’s lower-than-hoped first dance is a big disappointment for Warner Brothers, which spent a hell of a lot of money and squawking time on the grim, turgid superhero alternate history.
• Mark at I Watch Stuff addresses the film’s marketing error:
  

  The non-stop barrage viral marketing wasn’t enough to push Zack Snyder’s latest past his previous March opener, 300, which had no viral marketing except the promise of some dudes fucking some other dudes up and someone getting foot-pushed into a hole. Now we know what brings in the crowds.

• David Poland at The Hot Blog speculates on whether or not the film will at least break even for Warner Bros.: “On the low end, the movie will still be looking to be about $20 million in the red in marketing costs, not close to putting money towards the production costs. And on the high end, marketing costs will be covered and about $0 will go towards the cost of production.”
• “If the thing can’t top next weekend’s ‘Race To Witch Mountain,’” worries Gabe Toro at The Playlist, “WB has a financial sinkhole on their hands and can only hope to score on its ‘Bigger Blue Dick Director’s Cut’.”

Under discussion:

Hannah Takes the Stairs  (2007)

It would take a certain amount of energy and emotional strength to produce a full consideration of David Denby’s piece in today’s New Yorker, which swiftly traces the lineage of the last seven years of American micro-independent film up to and including Joe Swanberg’s upcoming SXSW and IFC VOD debut, Alexander the Last. I currently feel that this variety of strength and quantity of energy are resources that I cannot access, and if I could, I’m not sure the best target to point them at would be a piece that has already been declared late to the party by two reliable sources.  However, in case it seems imperative to take up this task at some point in the future, here are the vague bases I would try to touch in such a consideration:

1. Prior to this, David Denby has produced two notable works in the past six months (in this case, we’ll take “notable” to be equivalent to “provoking of blog posts and/or mocking on The Daily Show“; if there is another definition of the word here on Planet Earth in 2009, I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it). Most recently, there was Snark, a polemical book in which the film critic argues that “snarkers like to think they are deploying wit, but mostly they are exposing the seethe and snarl of an unhappy country, releasing bad feeling but little laughter,” and goes on to cite with no apparent humour intended the nine elements that make snark so dangerous.  A short time after Snark was published, Denby wrote off The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — a film which might rightly be considered to embody the bloated sincerity that finely calibrated snark so successfully deflates –– with the witty rejoinder, “who cares?” Denby then went on to point out, clearly without “bad feeling”, that “many people in Hollywood endlessly have ‘work’ done to put off aging, and here’s a movie that begins with a wizened baby and ends with physical perfection, a progression that may encapsulate both the nightmares and the dreams of half the Academy.”
2. Up until this point, about once a year, every year of this decade, someone somewhere declared something an example of The New Sincerity. Radio/podcast host Jesse Thorn once called it a “cultural movement founded by yours truly.” As described by Thorn, The New Sincerity is all about “a willingness to earnestly appreciate something even if it’s bigger than something someone would earnestly feel comfortable earnestly appreciating. Even if it means taking the risk of someone thinking it’s ridiculous because, ultimately, it’s more important to be awesome than to be cool.” This desire for sincerity pops up in various corners of the culture every now and then, usually as a self-conscious reaction to what was called in the 90s “irony”, and only became “snark” after everyone said that after 9/11, irony couldn’t exist. For whatever reason, The New Sinceritists have failed to embrace Denby’s attack on snark, which has not often been described as either “awesome” or “cool,” as far as I am aware. However, I will admit that the most intensive criticism of Snark that I’ve consumed has been that blogged/vlogged/Twittered by Ana Marie Cox, who took exception to Denby’s comments about her former blog Wonkette, and who described the book as one “about getting kids off his lawn.”
3. Emily Gould, former editor of Gawker and, in some circles, the poster girl for snark without substance, memorably eviscerated Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs in concert with its premiere at the IFC Center. In that review, Gould refered to Hannah as “megahyped” and generally sold the fiction that that the film was some kind of corporate ploy to sell her generation back to itself, and that it got that representation wrong; she specifically complained that a scene in which one character remarks on another’s blog-to-book deal “made the movie seem at least two years old.” This was before Gould had a bit of a scandal involving boys and blogs, which she funneled into her own book deal; she now says that when she edited Gawker, she “really did not ever think of the person I was writing about sitting there and reading what I’d written. I sincerely thought that the kind of people who got written about were somehow different from me.” One wonders what she might think of Hannah on a second viewing after all that has happened to all of us since that heady summer of 2007. But let’s just confine this argument to that moment: in that moment, Emily Gould was New York media’s highest profile snarkist, and of Joe Swanberg, she didn’t approve.
4. So if there is an imaginary line in the sand between snark and sincerity which informs much of our contemporary conversation and most of our popular culture, then anti-snark crusader Denby is now only pointing to what we may have known in our hearts for awhile, which is that a handful of filmmakers and their slightly larger number of fans are on one side of this line, and the tastemakers of young adult media consumption and most of the consumers the trickle down to are irrevocably on the other. It’s maybe a no brainer which side the David Denbys of the world gravitate to. Are these films, which strive for a certain realism regarding life as a twenty-something today (and, in many cases, I think, achieve it) fundamentally at odds with what really real people of that generation accept as either art or entertainment? And if the whole point of working on a small scale is to be able to do things and say things that they wouldn’t be able to do if their creative decisions were dictated by demographic research and corporate synergy and the financial passions of fifty-somethings — well, isn’t that the point?

Zift is one of five films to screen at SXSW this year which is being promoted as a simultaneous premiere at the festival and on Video on Demand via IFC (like all of its fellows in the series except for Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last, it comes to Austin and your living room after an extensive festival run; two of the films in the series, Paper Covers Rock and Medicine for Melancholy, screened at SXSW last year). We talked to Zift director Javor Gardev talked about meeting Americans in Argentina, offered the only fast and loose plot synopsis I’ve ever seen to invoke both Casablanca and Georges Bataille, and declared himself “the king of the blurb.” We can’t argue there. The Zift trailer, and his further answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, after the jump.

Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.

The movie is made after the novel Zift by Vladislav Todorov who also wrote the script. The DOP Emil Christov was the most experienced person in my crew and the composer Kalin Nikolov the youngest member of it. Nikola Toromanov and Daniela Oleg Lyahova – my closest friends and stage designers that I work with for theatrical performances — did the art direction and young Kevork Aslanyan worked on the editing. Actors Zachary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir Penev, Mihail Mutafov and Djoko Rosic were principal cast. Georgi Dimitrov, Ilian Djevelekov and Matey Konstantinov produced it with their “Miramar Film.”

From the very start I chose to play a contrarian. While everybody around was doing social dramas, I went for a strong genre-driven movie and suddenly this made a difference. It’s like Gilda meets Ivan Lapshin, they fall in love in Casablanca, decide to marry in Brazil, call Vladimir Lenin to deliver a speech at their wedding, Johnny Rotten to entertain them during the party, Ilya Kabakov to paint their family portrait, Michel Foucault to theorize on the meaning of their marriage, and Georges Bataille to teach them how to play golf with eyeballs. Bingo, there’s nothing left out. I am the king of the blurb!

Do you have a day job/a non-filmmaking occupation that raises money for your filmmaking efforts? Tell us about it.

Yes, I do have a day job. I make my living as stage director. I do performances. Being a director seems to be unavoidable destiny in my particular case.

Have you been to SXSW before? If so, tell us about your funniest story from the experience. If not, what are you looking forward to re: the festival and/or the city of Austin?

No, I haven’t been either to SXSW before, or to Texas. Nevertheless, my mind is not a “tabula rasa.” It’s stuffed with all sorts of political, literary and movie myths about Texas in general and Austin in particular. So, I’m in danger now, as myths are usually dispelled as soon as they clash with reality. I’m looking forward to it.

Let’s get hypothetical: You’re on death row. The night of your execution, you’re allowed to watch any two films of your choice. What would you pick for your last-night-on-Earth double feature?

So, let’s get hypothetical indeed. I am on death row and I’m allowed to watch any two films I want. Honestly, I won’t be eager to take advantage of this courtesy. I’d be very busy pissing in my pants scared shitless. Cinema (both mainstream and independent!) would be my very last concern. However, I wouldn’t object if the next door wardens watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem or Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier.

There’s been  some criticism that the only way to get into SXSW is by being a part of an “incestuous scene where everybody knows everybody.” So who did *you* have to sleep with to get in? (Metaphorically or literally: are there any SXSW filmmaker(s) past or present that you’re close with personally and/or professionally, and how have those relationships helped or hurt the process of producing your film and getting it seen?)

Unfortunately, I am the very last person this particular criticism applies to. I was geographically so far away from that “incestuous scene” that I even didn’t know anything about it before reading your enlightening question. I met few months ago in Argentina, Barry Jenkins, Greta Gerwig and Aaron Katz at Mar del Plata IFF. I suppose, they must be part of the independent scene you talk about. This is more or less every overseas indie I know. I hope, it’s going to change now.