With "Watchmen" opening, you say you don't know any damn movie reviewer worth the trouble of reading? I've got the guy for you: Jim Dawson

In case you hadn't heard, Watchmen opens today nationwide.

by Ken

Watchmen opens nationwide today, and insulated as I generally keep myself these days from news of the movie world (if I really want to throw $12.50, or whatever they're charging these days in NYC theaters, down the sewer, I'd just as soon skip the middlemen and dump it right down), even I can tell from all the kvelling around me that this is an event of some sort, with mucho moolah being spent. Once upon a time my first thought would have been, what a shame it is that I don't know of a single movie critic I can even turn to for basic information about the picture. The only thing that's changed, really, is that the quality of the stuff being churned out has become so predictably abysmal that I just don't pay any attention.

If I wanted to pay attention, however, I would know now where to turn. It's not one of your high-powered glossy publications, or even one of your lower-powered and vaguely seedy ones. It's a website called Back Room Reviews, and it's the work of Jim Dawson. Actually, Jim's review of Watchmen appears in L.A. City Beat, for which Jim has been doing some writing (for insultingly puny pittances, though not so insulting that he turns them down). However, you still have to turn to the Back Room Reviews note for notes on the LACB presentation of the review.

I suppose I should say that Jim is a friend, but I'm certainly not going to apologize for that fact. I'm proud of it. And I've benefited shamelessly. Even before Back Room Reviews took shape, Jim clued me in to Sam Mendes's hypnotically beautiful -- visually and aurally -- American Beauty , and cautioned me in particular that it's a film that needs to be seen theatrically rather than on TV. And was he ever right! I've watched it, or tried to, a couple of times since on TV, and it isn't remotely the same experience. I wonder whether I would even have liked the film.

Fortunately, Jim had built up enough of a reservoir of credibility that I gave in to his urgent recommendation of the altogether remarkable (three-hour!) German-Austrian-Canadian-Hungarian coproduction Sunshine. There's probably no other way I would have seen it.

(I see that these were both 1999 releases. It probably also helped that back then -- -- we still had a reduced-price movie theater in Manhattan, charging as I recall $3, which grew to a whopping $4 before the enterprise shut down. At that price a person could afford to take a chance on pretty much anything. That's how, for example, I came to see Alexander Payne's little-touted Election, with Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, which instantly became one of my all-time favorite movies.)

The "back story" of Back Row Reviews is that Jim, by virtue of having married right, has access to screenings of pretty much every movie that comes out. And the fact that he doesn't pay to say these dogs figures in his rating system, as he explains it on the BRR site:

Is this brutally honest, cheap-shots-flinging webpage an altruistic public service, a time-wasting fiasco or the height of arrogant egomania? You decide, o gentle reader. You decide.

I started this freebie featurette on July 16, 2000. All movies are arranged in alphabetical order by title, under headings for year of release.

Why do so many of the movies I review get an "F" grade? If you have to ask, you must not go to the multiplex very often. If I had to pay to see something, but I would have wished that I could get my wasted money back afterward, the offending film gets an "F." Simple, huh?

Also, I'm not one of those dishonest, condescending phonies who grades on a sliding scale as an act of sympathetic solidarity with the stupid. Know how some big-name critics occasionally endorse lousy, lowest-common-denominator pieces of junk that you just know they never would recommend to their personal friends or to anyone they actually respect? Know how those overpaid, insincere hacks sometimes put their critical faculties on hold, in a patronizing attempt to come off like "regular joes?" That won't happen here!

No indeed! What caught my eye glancing over the 2009-to-date review list, was the number of movies rated "D+."

Now "D-" is, I think, a fairly familiar concept. This is the grade given by a grader who has almost unvarnished contempt for the material at hand but finds in it some saving grace that lifts it above out-and-out failure. And I think we all have instant associations for a plain "D" grade.

But "D+"? Think about if for a moment. It says, no, this isn't an enterprise of quite the full-blown awfulness of your standard "D," by virtue of either some incidental grace or perhaps simply an incomplete follow-through on the enterprise's apparent program. I'm not sure I would want to actually see one of the "D+" treasures, but the mere concept tickles me.

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