Slate Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Imagine if Zack Snyder wasn't the director behind the long-awaited big-screen adaptation of Watchmen, and Warner Bros. instead decided to go with someone like ... Woody Allen. Slate put together a pretty hilarious slideshow of what they think Watchmen would've looked like had the property been placed in someone else's hands. For example, as a Quentin Tarantino movie (see above), Slate notes: "As Jackie Brown was a tribute to '70s blaxploitation, Kill Bill was a tribute to '70s kung fu, and Death Proof was a tribute to '70s grindhouse, so Quentin Tarantino makes Watchmen a tribute to the fourth in his canon of formative aesthetic influences: '70s Hanna-Barbera cartoons."

Other directors with re-imagined Watchmen films included on Slate's list are Judd Apatow, Woody Allen, Sophia Coppola and Tyler Perry (their image of Rorschach as Madea made me do a serious LOL). And in case you're wondering, these fantastic images (a couple of which we highlighted below) come from Ashley Quigg. All kidding aside, though, something like this does make you think. I mean, what would a Watchmen film look like in someone else's hands? Did Zack Snyder do the comic justice, or is there another director who would've delivered a better product.

Check out a couple of Slate's images below, then definitely skip on over to their slideshow ... it's hysterical.



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There was a lot of complaining yesterday about the Oscar nominations, mostly from critics and other film writers who were disappointed with Dreamgirls not earning a Best Picture nod. And even those who weren't complaining about it were at least stunned to the point that the snub seemed to become the biggest news in the history of the Oscars (our own Scott Weinberg thankfully made no mention of it). For those who want a simple abridged version of the nomination coverage, GreenCine has it all.

Dana Stevens at Slate seems to be one of the only people who doesn't mind that Dreamgirls was left out of the main race, and instead asks the more important question: what happened to Volver? The film was a favorite for the foreign language category, and it certainly should have garnered Almodóvar another screenplay nomination. Others that Stevens felt deserved noms include Catherine O'Hara (I don't agree entirely, but I feel she's more deserving than Breslin) and Philip Glass' score for The Illusionist (Glass was instead nominated for his Notes on a Scandal work).

Has Slate, the online news magazine, really been around for nine years? I only got wind of "The Movie Club" last year, when several critics -- in the form of letters to one another -- batted back and forth the hot button issues of the movie year (last year "gay movies" was one of the topics). Several critics of my acquaintance and I passed around e-mails among ourselves furthering their discussions. If you love movies, it's the must-read item for January.

This year the debate is led by new Slate critic Dana Stevens, who started her duties just last summer. She invited Wesley Morris (the Boston Globe), Keith Phipps (The Onion A.V. Club) and Carina Chocano (the Los Angeles Times) to join in the discussions. Stevens starts out with a confession near and dear to my heart: she doesn't like war movies. At last someone has the guts to say so. (I secretly suspect that no one likes war movies, but no one wants to be portrayed as an anti-American commie terrorist, so everyone pretends otherwise.)

In her short tribute to Robert Altman, Stevens also poses -- but doesn't answer -- the question of who might be the director of the 2000s. Though I wasn't invited to Ms. Stevens' party, may I suggest, off the top of my head, Sofia Coppola, with her near-masterpiece Lost in Translation and the underrated, misunderstood pair The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette? The Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul may be an even better candidate; he made his feature debut in 2000 with the amazing non-fictional, fiction film Mysterious Object at Noon, and followed it with at least two more extraordinary films, Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady. (Perhaps Clint Eastwood is a better candidate? Maybe I'm just grasping at straws here; maybe there isn't a "director of the 2000s" yet...)

In any case, Weerasethakul's Tropical Malady was the best gay film of 2005. Along those lines, Morris asks whether 2006 was actually gayer than 2005. We also have attacks against and defenses for Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and Borat, as well as many other fascinating topics. ...

The organizers of the massive Toronto International Film Festival announced the names of all 25 of their North American premieres (a number that amounts to about 2% of the roughly 30 zillion movies that will screen at the fest) yesterday, and it looks like Toronto is setting up to be Cannes West. Among those titles are such Cannes successes as Red Road, Shortbus, Babel, Nani Moretti's The Caiman and Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes the Barley. The non-Cannes films on display include a refreshingly large group from Asia, including Time (Korea), Bliss (China), Invisible Waves (Thailand) and Takashi Miike's Big Bang Love: Juvenile A (Japan).

Though James covered many of the big Cannes premieres already, we will also be on the ground in Toronto and will catch up with a few of the films he missed (hey, one man can only do so much), hopefully including The Caiman; the 2006 TIFF unspools this fall, running from September 7 to September 16.

One of the coolest things that Slate does every year is present a virtual movie roundtable each December, during which a group of well-known film critics discuss the previous 12 months. Though it's ostensibly focused on Top 10s, the conversations, which have been taking place since 1998, usually go off into all sorts of interesting directions - and this year's is no exception.

The participants in the 2005 Movie Club are an impressive crew: Slate critic David Edelstein (who is heading off to New York Magazine in 2006), the Chicago Reader's brilliant Jonathan Rosenbaum, the incredibly busy Scott Foundas (who writes for Variety and about about 100 other publications), and A. O. Scott of the New York Times. The discussion between the four (which takes the form of email messages) starts off with a bang, with Rosenbaum immediately diving into a discussion of film criticism in general, and what "best" really means. Don't be scared off by the theory, though – there's plenty of chatter about specific films as well, and the next three days of emails will surely offer intelligent, passionate disagreements. The chance to eavesdrop on these guys makes it well worth checking the link below every day (at least until Friday, when the 2005 Movie Club sadly comes to an end).

Edward Jay Epstein has an interesting piece in Slate about the decline in movie attendance, and the new model employed by studios to fill seats. It seems that once entertainment became more home based, studios had to turn movies into heavily-advertised, word of mouth "events." In other words, instead of creating a movie, you create an audience. It's interesting to say the least, and it helps to explain why so many people go to the movies, and yet so few have anything to say about them.