The Screengrab

Movie nerds like myself, who have invested what little remains of their self-identity in the remote possibility of Watchmen not being terrible, were thrown into a major tizzy a few months ago when FOX Studios, which claims to own the rights to any and all future movie adaptations of the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons superhero classic, moved to legally block Warner Brothers from releasing the Zack Snyder film.

Many felt this would be an epic moral battle where FOX exerted their rights in the labyrinth of complex entertainment laws to protect their rightful property regardless of future plans, while fending off the ire of pissed-off fans; others thought that it would be a titanic legal showdown where Warner allayed incomprehensible facts and figures in a desperate attempt to prove themselves on the correct side of the law and get their movie out on time.  Others, like your humble correspondent, figured that it was basically just FOX making a bunch of noise, based on a slender bit of legalese, in order to wring a fat payday out of what's widely predicted to be one of 2009's top-grossing films.   As Mania.com is reporting, well...one of us was right.

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We do our best to keep you updated about comics-to-film adaptations here at the Screengrab, but it's rare that we get to bring you news of a good comic being adapted for motion pictures.  (And when we do, we're usually pretty nervous about it; see the last half-million posts we've made about Watchmen.)  We were a bit surprised when it was announced recently that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's critically acclaimed DC/Vertigo miniseries We3 was set for a big-screen pickup -- but not as suprised as we were when further details started coming in.

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Early shoppers who lined up quick at their local video vendors this morning got a one-time special treat with their DVD copies of The Dark Knight.  No, not the free digital download code that allows you to get a second copy of the billion-dollar actioner (unless, of course, you own a Mac, or want to be able to play it on your iPod, or something crazy like that).

No, I'm talking about the hilariously misguided -- though is there any other kind -- anti-piracy 'public service' advertisement that precedes the movie.  Anyone who ponied up for a copy of the latest Christoper Nolan Batman flick -- and are thus by definition not engaging in piracy -- got to watch a bunch of footage from Casablanca in which Rick Blaine estimates those who would violate studio policy as being morally somewhere south of Major Strasser.

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Let it never be said that the European film industry is so arty that it doesn't know a cash cow when one comes rambling by.  In fact, Europe's reputation as a bastion of filmic integrity rests largely on the fact that, as a rule, only the best of their films are exported to the U.S.; we rarely see their big dumb moneymakers, which, in the Old World as the New, tend to be noisy action pictures, dopey romances and lowest-common-denominator comedies.  Regardless of the assumptions some people make about Euro-film, producers over there aren't banking on a new Pasolini to pay for their winter vacation.

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No, unfortunately, your humble correspondent, despite his long history of being obsessed with the upcoming Zack Snyder adaptation of Alan Moore's brilliant Watchmen  comic, was not one of those recently invited to view 26 minutes of the footage at a special preview screening. Nor was I numbered among those who got to see the entire film at a preview in Portland, to decidedly mixed reviews.  Why I wasn't included despite my spooky fixation on the movie is unclear; it might have something to do with the fact that I've predicted the movie will suck raw pork knuckles since it was first announced.  Whatever the case, I haven't seen the damn movie yet, and so that's not what I'm going to be reviewing today.

What I'm going to be reviewing today isn't even, technically, a movie.  I'm not sure what it is.  Its producers call it a "motion comic".  It's not an animated film, exactly, nor is it a motion picture, nor is it a webcomic or anything else that we have the critical language to talk about.  It's also not playing at a theater near you:  it's available (the first three chapters, at least) exclusively as a download from the iTunes music store.  Even though it isn't music, either.  So what is it?  It's basically the entire comic, written by Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons, panel by panel, with a very basic, stripped-down sort of cutout animation.  It's also narrated, but not dramatized -- that is, the dialogue is read aloud, in a sort of dramatic fashion, by character actor Tom Stechschulte.  But he's the only member of the cast, which means it's not really a dramatic adaptation of the story -- or any kind of adaptation at all, really.  It's almost like a book on tape of a comic book, only it movies.  Kinda.

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So you're in a high-stress profession.  You work all day and all night to try to make the world a better place, but to protect some very important people, you have to keep certain things about your job secret.  But the strain of such a massive secret, a thing that some people would kill to know, can't be borne forever by just one man.  So you turn to the one person you think you can trust, the one man you believe will keep your secret:  your faithful butler.  And then he goes and blabs it to the whole world.

Ever since Christopher Nolan's latest Batman flick, The Dark Knight, made its first trillion dollars, speculation has been rampant about who's going to play the villain role in the next installment.  Heath Ledger's untimely death makes it an unlikely, albeit intriguing, possibility that he'll return as the Joker; the two hottest rumors are that Angelina Jolie will be the draw, slipping into a Catwoman costume, and that Johnny Depp and Phillip Seymour Hoffman will tag team as the Riddler and the Penguin.  Both have generally dismissed as fan-driven wishful thinking until yesterday, when Michael Caine -- currenty paying his club fees as Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred -- took a moment at the Toronto International Film Festival to cite an unnamed Warner Brothers exec and insist that the latter rumor is true.

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The Dark Knight  is currently smashing box office records with the same alacrity that the Joker makes a pencil disappear, and as with the first Christopher Nolan Batman movie, its soundtrack is provided by two veteran industry hands in the person of James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer.  While it seems like this time around, their work was heavily influenced by the seething, screeching, atonal score that Jonny Greenwood wrote for There Will Be Blood, it's still highly reminiscent of the work they did for Batman Begins.

The two had their work cut out for them when they accepted the assignment from Warner Brothers to score the rebooting of the Batman franchise.  DC Comics' famed vigilante already had a number of memorable pieces of music associated with him:  from the jaunty, swinging theme song to the campy '60s TV show composed by jazz veteran Neal Hefti to the brooding, chaotic main theme written by Danny Elfman for the first Tim Burton Batman (which later became the theme music for the celebrated Batman animated series), and even Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus have been associated with the hero in the past.  Their goal when putting together a new score for Nolan's reboot of the franchise was to create something that conjured the proper tone of darkness and struggle without too obviously drawing on what had come before.  Howard, whose previous work has included The Prince of Tides and The Sixth Sense, took charge of the main theme and the loftier passages, while Zimmer, the German-born composer who created the eerie score for The Ring as well as the memorable soundtrack to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, worked on the incidental music and quieter, more sinister passages.  It was imperative that they create something that enhanced the brooding, bleak tone of Batman Begins while never threatening to overwhelm the action on screen or make the psychological development of the characters too obvious.

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Tasha Robinson at the AV Club brings us a brief but very engaging interview with Andrew Stanton, longtime studio pro at Pixar and the director of WALL-E.  In a wide-ranging discussion, he talks about the lunch meeting that produced a decade of the best animated films in history, the development of Pixar from a handful of like-minded creatives to a massive Hollywood studio employing hundreds of people, and his unconventional approach to writing a script in which the main character has no voice.  "I remember reading the script for Alien," he recalls; "It was written by Dan O'Bannon, and he had this amazing format where he didn't use a regular paragraph of description.  He would do little four-by-eight word descriptions and then sort of left-justify it and make it about four lines each, little blocks, so it almost looked like haikus.  It would create this rhythm in the readers where you would appreciate these silent visual moments as much as you would the dialogue on the page.  It really set you into the rhythm and mindset of what it would be like to watch the finished film.  I was really inspired by that, so I used that format for WALL-E."  

One of the fascinating things about the interview is the discussion of how the most high-tech movie studio in history uses some positively primitive methods to actually make their movies.  Starting with the standard lament that computers will always take up all the time you allocate them to solve a problem ("Once you've got more memory, you just want to do more with it.  And you end up feeling it takes just as long to do now the 16 things in five minutes instead of the one thing you used to do in five minutes"), Stanton notes that Pixar always views its films as storytelling challenges, not technical ones (how do you make a cool movie about monsters, as opposed to how do you solve the fur problem in CGI).  He also notes that, with WALL-E, they were attempting to tell a story almost entirely visually, and so looked back -- way back -- for cues:  forsaking Chuck Jones' Warner Brothers cartoons as overly familiar to geeks like themselves, they instead prepared for each day's work by watching a Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd silent short every day at lunch for a year and a half.

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Up until now, the "No, But I've Read the Movie" has focused on great works of western literature, and assessed the movie versions to see if they can possibly stand up to the titanic reputations of the novels upon which they are based.  That ends today!  For today, we will focus on one of the most successful, and yet overrated and overblown, works of the western canon:  Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.  It's a novel that helped launch her career as one of the preeminent authors and philosophers of our time, but as a novel, it's hokey, overlong, bloated, and filled with characters one dimension short of being one-dimensional; and as philosophy, it's incomplete, inconsistent, and unable to look past its own epistemological shortcomings.  Rand's ideology of Objectivism became hugely popular, just as her novels became huge best-sellers, but whereas most literary adaptations were doomed to failure because what makes a great novel rarely makes a great movie, anyone daring to tackle her endlessly preachy books would be faced with the prospect of improving on the original, rather than dumbing it down for the format.  Given the runaway success of The Fountainhead -- Rand's story of an incorruptible architect who refuses to compromise his craft to satisfy the demands of the masses -- it was inevitable that there would be a film adaptation.  The question is, how would it handle such a patently unworkable premise and fundamentally unbelievable storyline?

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