On Movies: Action pic 'Watchmen' really something else

'Here's the thing," says

Zack Snyder

, on the phone from Los Angeles, just before what he calls his "boutique-y" little picture,

Watchmen

, blasted into theaters this weekend.

"You can say whatever you want about Watchmen, but you have to admit that in some ways it's something else," he says.

And he's right: Adapted from the groundbreaking Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel, and featuring a dysfunctional band of masked men and women in a dystopian alternate 1985 America, Watchmen bends and breaks the rules of the standard studio comic-book action pic.

"Not only is it something else," Snyder explains, "but it's something else in direct relation to pop culture. It comments on the very audience that I'm asking go see it."

By which Snyder means the fanboys - and fangirls - who are as obsessed with the original Watchmen book as Snyder was, and is. But here's the thing: Just as the 43-year-old director thought he was making 300 as a niche flick for aficionados of Frank Miller's graphic novel - and then the green-screen retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae turned into one of 2007's biggest hits - Watchmen is another fanboy affair poised for megahitdom.

"Fanboy culture has turned into mass culture," says the director, who has spent the last three years on his film. "Watchmen satirizes comic-book culture, but comic-book culture turns out to be mass culture, because we have all been educated with X-Men and Fantastic Four and Batman and Superman and every man you can think of. . . .

"It's almost like the audience is saying, 'Yeah, I know, I get it. I get Batman. Enough already. What else?' "

The "what else" of Watchmen - which stars Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson - is both a subversion and a deconstruction of the genre, with a band of "masks" doing ugly stuff in a world on the edge of Armageddon.

"This is the mythology we've been fed. We've been told to shut up and drink the mass-culture Kool-Aid," Snyder says. "Watchmen at least gives you the chance to look into the bowl before you drink it, and see how it's made."

With a budget on the far side of $100 million, Watchmen differs dramatically in look and feel from Snyder's testosteroned, video game-like 300. Flip through Moore and Gibbons' original pages and you'll see tableaux rich with detail: walls adorned with pinups, newspaper clippings, and porno books that are more than mere props - they're part of the multilayered narrative.

Snyder and his team have tried to replicate that approach on screen - even the most discerning viewer might miss all the crazy art and objects amid the carnage and clutter of the film.

"I really wanted to try to capture the fetishistic attitude that the book has - the way the book treats the disease of being a superhero," says the director. "For us, it was about having that relationship with the material - having the fetish of the filmmakers be the subconscious aspect that speaks to the characters' obsessions."

Snyder went so far as to make a poster for a movie that Gugino's character, Sally Jupiter, a.k.a. Silk Spectre, starred in long ago.

"If you're familiar with the graphic novel, there's a movie poster for Silk Slingers of Suburbia, which is a movie that Sally made, a sort of soft-core porn B-movie. . . . And you'd have to freeze-frame Watchmen to find it, but it's one of those things. We spent tons of time and meticulous effort to create this movie poster. And, by the way, there's a million examples of that kind of thing.

"That right there tells you something," he adds, laughing. "Maybe that's crazy, but that's how we related to this material."

Behind the seams. "It's so funny, when I read these reviews of the film, they call me narcissistic," says Jay McCarroll, the Philly-based clothing designer who stars in the documentary Eleven Minutes.

"I'm pretty sure if I was narcissistic you wouldn't see me with my greasy forehead and my ratty clothes and a zit on my face. I just think that's so silly."

McCarroll, who attended Philadelphia University back when it was the College of Textiles & Science, is the winner of Season One's Project Runway competition. A couple of years later, with funding from the Humane Society (he's a pescatarian, and anti-fur), McCarroll debuted his inaugural line at New York Fashion Week. That process, almost a year in the making, is what filmmakers Rob Tate and Michael Selditch have engagingly captured in Eleven Minutes. The film opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse.

"On Project Runway, everyone thought that I could whip up a prom dress overnight for their daughter," McCarroll quips. "And that is not the reality of it at all, you know. So, the film is just about showing the process of all that stuff, everything that goes into it."

McCarroll, 34, hails from Lehman, Pa., in Luzerne County. His year of struggling to create a cool, fun line for women and men - and of dealing with pattern-makers, silk-screeners, publicists, buyers, models, photographers, factories in China, and fiascos in Manhattan - makes for a fascinating film.

Nowadays, McCarroll lives in South Philly and sells his wares online (www.jaymccarroll.com). He's designed fabric that's available at Spool, on South Street. And he's glad he escaped New York.

"You always have moments where you think shoulda-woulda-coulda, but you can't, it's all in the past," he says. "I'm happy that I left New York. I think that it was crazy, too crazy for me. . . .

"Now I'm realizing there's a difference between fashion and clothing. I just want to make clothes. Four years ago, I wanted to be a fashion-design star. But it's not real to me."