The Bride! (2/5 Stars)

By Wikipedia’s count, there have been 494 movies, 248 short films, 105 TV series, and 420 TV series that have featured Frankenstein’s monster. Of those, there have been 5-10 adaptations of actual novel by Mary Shelley into feature length films, depending on how fast and loose with the source material you allow a movie to be and count it as an adaptation of the source material. Frankenstein is notable for the sheer amount of adaptations and references of the book and its monster relative to the fact that there isn’t a single good movie in all of them to actually recommend. This streak of adaptive failures is, to my knowledge, the longest running and most numerous string of clunkers in movie history. It dates all the way back to the silent era and adds several new examples of rubbish seemingly every year.

The most famous movies, those from Universal Studios in the 1930s, starring Boris Karloff are terrible. The monster in those movies can’t even talk, depriving the audience of any exploration of the book’s philosophical themes. The best thing about this version of the monster is the makeup and hairstyling. Fast-forward to Guillermo Del Toro’s adaptation just last year in 2025 and you will find a sexy monster, played by Jacob Elordi, that is oddly immortal, once again confounding the themes of the novel and entirely missing the point. Now we have The Bride! which seeks to layer-on a confusing and anachronistic #MeToo contrivance to, yet again, an underdeveloped if not completely written off exploration of the book’s themes. The best movie to feature Frankenstein’s monster is still Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, which also doesn’t explore the book’s themes, but didn’t have to because it was a parody of all the previous movies that also didn’t utilize those themes. All it had to be was funny, and it was. (The Bride! randomly utilizes the song "Puttin' on the Ritz" at one point, which means writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal has seen Young Frankenstein and wants us to know that she knows about it).

What is “Frankenstein” about? There has been a good adaptation of it, Director Danny Boyle and Writer Nick Dear’s play for the London’s National Theater starring Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch. (During COVID, the National Theater made certain performances available for streaming for a limited time. This was one of them and I was very happy to see it on a TV screen). In that play, the whole prologue up to the creation of the monster is omitted. It starts in the point of view of the monster, as he is being “born” into a world of pain and darkness. The monster's first interaction with a human being is his creator screaming in horror and abandoning him to fend for himself. The monster, through trials and tribulations, manages to survive, even to learn language and to read books, one of them Paradise Lost by John Milton. But hostility stalks his lonely days as the people blanch from his hideous form and repeatedly try to hurt and kill him. Finally, he meets up with his creator and has an articulate discussion with him about why he was created, and who owes what, if anything, to whom. This conversation is not unlike one that we, the human species, may have with our God, that elusive deity that put us here amongst unforgiving nature for no objective rhyme or reason. From the play:

Creature: Here is my request. I wish to be part of society. But no human being will associate with me. But one of my own kind - one just as deformed and horrible - she would understand - she would -

Victor: What, I-

Creature: I want a female. Built like me.

Victor: A female?

Creature: You alone have the power to-

Victor: Create another brute - another monster? No, I will not, I -

Creature: It is my right!

Victor: You have no rights. You are a slave. You want me to make you a female so the pair of you can be wicked together? No, I will not. Torture me as much as you like, I’ll never consent!

Creature: I will not torture you. I will reason with you. Isn’t that what we do? Have a dialogue?

Victor: There is no dialogue with killers!

Creature: Yet you’d kill me if you could! Why, you have just tried! So why is your killing justified, and mine is not?

Victor: I won’t argue with you! My god, I’m halfway up a mountain, debating with a - a -

Creature: A living creature!

Victor: A nothing, a filthy mass of nothing! I am your master, you should show respect -

Creature: A master has duties — you left me to die! I am not a slave. I am free. If you deny my request I will make you my enemy, I will work at your destruction. I will dedicate myself, I won’t rest until I desolate your heart!

What a delicious and interesting subject matter this is. And, to my knowledge, no adaptation of Frankenstein in the movie format has ever used it. The Bride! is no exception. The book does not really have a take on Frankenstein’s bride. The creature is alive for about 30 seconds. In the original Universal Studios Bride of Frankenstein movie, the bride is in only one scene before also dying. Again, the best thing about the Bride of Frankenstein is her makeup and hairstyling.

Here, the Bride, played by Jessica Buckley, is not really in the same position as the monster, played by Christian Bale. It is the 1920s, (the monster is immortal which still makes no sense) and has apparently been wandering the earth for about one hundred years. His bodily condition is just as hideous. He won’t die but he also won’t heal. He asks a new scientist, Dr. Euphronius, played by Annette Bening (who is a woman, credit please) to create for him a bride. They find a recently deceased young woman, in fact she is a victim of a homicide, hook her up to some fancy equipment and shock her to life.

Unlike the relationship between Frankenstein and his monster, see above, the monster adores the Bride! and would do anything for her. But there is a problem that simply cannot be overlooked. The monster didn’t seek her permission before bringing her back to life. There was no consent. #MeToo

Here is another big difference. Whereas, the general populace reeled in horror at the sight of Frankentsein’s monster and tried to kill him, the populace here is overcome with lust for the Bride and repeatedly tries to rape her. Now, I’m not a rape expert, but it is my general understanding that most rapes are committed between people who know each other in isolated places, and when it is occurs between strangers, it also happens in isolated places. It is of course, a serious crime, even in the 1920s, and men generally don’t commit serious crimes when there are witnesses around.

In this movie, upon being created, the Bride seeks the joy of life by dancing in a speakeasy. She catches the eye of some neer-do-well-men, and as she is being escorted by the monster (She calls him Frank for some reason) out of this public venue onto a public street, these two men assault both her and Frank with the aim of (I’m pretty sure) raping her. And this isn’t the only time this occurs in this movie. Near the end, Frank and the Bride are pulled over by a traffic cop on the side of the road. Frank lies down and hides his face as if he is sleeping to try to hide the fact that he is a wanted monster. The cop decides that this would be a good time to direct the Bride to exit the vehicle and attempt to rape her.

The rapes don’t occur becuase Frank, the uber-strong monster, kills the rapists. That might be the most realistic part of these scenarios. It is a bad idea to rape a man’s woman in front of him, doubly so if he is a big strong monster. You think society would understand, but no, Frank and the Bride become wanted criminals and escape onto the local highways like Bonnie and Clyde.

A lot of this movie is needlessly contrived. For obvious reasons, Frank and the Bride’s murderous actions are justified even if the scenarios which prompt those actions are severely implausible. At other times, other equally implausible scenarios prompt behavior which is not justified at all. In one scene, The Bride draws a gun and waves it around wildly at a high society gathering (I forget exactly why). The cops show up, draw all of their guns…but don’t shoot The Bride, even though she is waving around a loaded gun in a crowded room of people. After a tense standoff, the Bride shoots a cop. Then the cops start shooting but none of them can aim straight enough to hit Bride as she makes her escape. The movie then argues that the Bride was acting in self-defense in such a scenario. That is stupid.

When implausible scenarios are met with justified actions that the world doesn’t understand, and unjustified actions that the movie insists are reasonable, then you have a movie that doesn’t work on a basic level. And these basic problems are not helped by the writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal's ability to shoe-horn the phrase “Me Too, Me Too!” in one of the Bride’s wild speeches near the end. I don’t give out points for that.As is tradition in Frankenstein adaptations, the best thing about this movie is the makeup and hairstyling.

Hey, imagine if Andy Serkis adapted Nick Dear’s play for the movie screen and played both Frankenstein in person and also the monster utilizing motion capture. Someone should make that movie.

Thor: Love and Thunder (3/5 Stars)

 

I don’t think anyone could have predicted that Thor would be the Marvel character to be the first to get a fourth movie. After all, Iron Man had gotten his third before anyone had even gotten their second and Thor’s second movie “The Dark World” is arguably the worst Marvel movie ever made. But Marvel took a fairly substantial and ultimately successful risk with the third movie “Ragnarok”, replacing the pseudo-Shakespearean seriousness of the first two installments with the rainbow goofiness of Taika Waititi, the new director of “Ragnarok” and here as well “Love and Thunder”. So dramatic was the reorientation of the Thor franchise, that the third movie left out entirely the largest subplot of the first two movies, Thor’s romantic relationship with the scientist Jane Foster, played by Natalie Portman. Say all you want about the acting chops of Natalie Portman (and there is much to say), but she isn’t all that funny. Given the new direction, ditching her was probably a wise move. But her story was still out there to wrap up. This “Love and Thunder” does while expanding dramatically the “Thor” universe of the “Marvel Universe”. 

There’s a lot of expanding going on all over the place in the Marvel Universe Phase 4. I watched the TV Series “Loki” and that introduced an infinite amount of timelines. I watched “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and that introduced an infinite amount of universes. I didn’t watch “The Eternals” but it seemed from the trailer that Marvel had decided to start its own religion (diverse and abnormally good looking, just like the world’s present elite). Now “Love and Thunder” establishes that every polytheistic religion in history has real gods that all hang out together in Omnipotent City. There is, among others, Queztalcoatl the Aztec god, Bast the Egyptian god, some sort of Samurai god, and Bao the god of dumplings. They are ostensibly led by Zeus, played here by a fat Russel Crowe with a Greek accent. It is hard to tell where Marvel is eventually going with all of this, but I expect it will be a bit more difficult to tie together something with the weightiness of the previous Avengers movie. After all, what does it matter what occurs in an Avengers movie when it has been established that we are watching but one timeline in one universe with an infinite amount of other timelines and other universes where something else entirely different occurs. I expect Marvel was always going to have this problem no matter what if had gotten so successful that it eventually introduced all of its characters. It seems like an exceedingly wise decision looking back to start the journey with the simplest of heroes, Iron Man, whose superpower was mechanical in nature. It helps to ease the audience into it. 

It was once opined by some person whose name escapes me that the advent of comic book characters was like the resurrection of the old polytheism. (I only remember that this person went on to prepare a thesis about this topic and then became a professor who taught this class for his entire career). I think that is only fitting that a villain of the “Thor” universe be a character named Gorr, The God Butcher, who vaguely resembles Jesus. What do I mean by that? Well, for one he is played by a thin Christian Bale and is dressed in sandals and a robe. He looks vaguely like Jesus might if he were a character in a Marvel movie. Also like Jesus (at least as compared to the old polytheistic gods) he lacks a sense of humor and is a bit of zealot. But really, the biggest similarity is that he is going around killing all of the gods, much like the intolerant Christians (and also Muslims) of history. It is not a mistake that Marvel did not include Jesus (and especially not the Prophet Mohammed) in the crowd in Omnipotent City. There would have been protests in America and riots in the Middle East. 

In “Ragnarok” the villain played by Cate Blanchett was kind of by-the-numbers and the weakest part of the movie. Here, Gorr the Butcher is one of the strongest parts. In particular, Christian Bale’s performance is so strong and his arguments so on point there is a real danger that his seriousness might overpower the goofiness of Thor’s new groove. Here is an example of how Taika Waititi (and his co-writer Jennifer Kaitlin Robinson) deftly avoid that. In one scene the children of New Asgaard (appropriately now a tourist attraction in the Disney owned Marvel Universe, see The Northman) are kidnapped by Gorr the Butcher, spirited to the Shadow Realm and threatened with death. Thor explains to the children that they are in a tight spot, but as they are Vikings of Asgaard, they will gain eternal reward in Valhalla should they die in glorious battle. Classic Thor. 

Two more notes. First, in one scene Thor gets his clothes blown off. The movie clearly uses CGI on Thor’s naked body. Really? Is even Chris Hemsworth not good looking enough for a Marvel movie? Second, one of the throw-away scenes involves an allusion to gay romance. I don’t think Marvel should get diversity credit for that unless they keep it in the Chinese version.

Ford v. Ferrari (3/5 Stars)

Ford v. Ferrari is a pretty good snapshot of all the contradictions of the sport of car racing. The fan base of this sport are red blooded Americans from those parts of the country that are all about less government and more bootstrap. They wear cowboy hats, eat steak, and drive cars, that most singular way to travel. But is there a sport out there that is less beholden to corporate interests? Look at those NASCAR cars. They are covered head to toe with advertisements. No car racer owns his own car. It is the corporation's car. This is because it takes a hell of a lot of money and engineering to build a car that can compete in these races. So much so that it may be a question as to whether the individual driver is all that important. Particularly in long races like the one at issue in this movie, the 24-hour race at Le Mans. No individual racer drives all the race. It is the car that goes the distance. But how do you tell a story about the car to the NASCAR fan base who are highly individualistic. (Were Carol Shelby and Ken Miles really ignorant of the rule that affects the end of this race? I mean, really?)

Ford v. Ferrari is a basic and competent sports story about simple and rebellious protagonists and affluent and beholden antagonists. It works on this basic level and is anchored by a cast of manly men: Matt Damon as coach/car builder Carol Shelby and Christian Bale as the driver Ken Miles get the job done on the ground. In the Ford office are Tracy Letts as Ford CEO Henry Ford II and two of his senior employees Jon Bernthal as Lee Iacocca and Josh Lucas as Leo Beebe. Ferrari is not played by a name actor and actually does not have much to do in this movie. The main conflict is between Lee Iacocca who wants to give our heroes (Damon and Bale) more discretion and Leo Beebe who is mainly interested in marketing. Why can’t our driver be more photogenic, asks Leo, we could totally sell more cars that way? This question becomes the linchpin of the movie. Will the corporation give the renegades enough leeway to succeed? Leo Beebe is portrayed as a scheming pretty boy. Josh Lucas does his smarmy best (I remember him from American Psycho).

Is Ford really an underdog here? It has all the money and talent and a willingness akin to the NFL’s Patriots to undertake courses of action that aren’t technically cheating, but probably should be. Reading between the lines, I got the feeling that Ferrari did not have much of a chance. All Ford needed to do was show up and care. The main impetus for the whole rivalry was the hurt feelings of Henry Ford II after Ferrari used the Ford Company’s interest in acquiring his company to run up the price on the other buyer, Fiat. Lee Iacocca reports this failure back to Henry Ford II and adds that Ferrari called Ford cars ugly and Henry II fat. Henry Ford II gruffly declares that the Le Mans racing team has a blank check. The rest is history. Ford won the next five years. I expect Ford stopped winning because it stopped caring. It made its point and went back to more profitable ventures, like selling cars to regular people. Meanwhile, we are told that Ferrari went bankrupt chasing perfection at Le Mans. There is a female character in this movie, the wife of Ken Miles. She feels out of place in this exorbitant high-stakes pissing contest.

This is one of those movies where I sort of wish there was a less Hollywood version. I would like to know more about the engineering and science of making a car go really fast for a very long time and less about the mystical and intangible qualities of race car drivers. Having said that, Christian Bale once again showcases his superhuman ability to gain/lose weight. Last time I saw him, he had the gut of Dick Cheney. Now, he is thin and wiry again. That talented jerk.

Vice (3/5 Stars)

Not that it is wise to suppose that Dick Cheney cares, but I bet he never suspected at the time when he was at the height of his power, that the little known writer currently working at Saturday Night Live producing Bear City skits would go on to make the definitive biopic of him. That is the problem with being an under-the-radar bearaucrat with little to no personality. Nobody talks about you, until one person does and that person becomes the only storyteller around.

The writer and director of Vice is Adam McKay, better known for his work directing Will Ferrel comedies such as Anchorman, Talldega Nights, and Step-Brothers. Will Ferrell is still doing that type of shtick. For the time being, Adam McKay seems to have moved on to more serious entertainment. His first venture into this genre, The Big Short, was one of the best movies of the year. Vice is in the same vein. It takes a complicated subject, the life and politics of hugely influential if not particularly known man, Richard Cheney, and tries its best to explain the significance of his policies and politics. The Big Short had an easier time at it. That movie's subject matter was complicated to, but the movie (and the book as well) adroitly got all the major points across by inserting them into the stories of several sympathetic well-rounded characters. Vice lacks a sympathetic well-rounded character. We learn alot about Dick Cheney but not so much about what makes him click. We learn much about what he did but not much about why he thought it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it would be hard for a writer-director such as Adam McKay to really understand someone so politically opposite. I have seen it done before though. I thought Oliver Stone did a particularly good job with Richard Nixon in Nixon. I mean, the movie makes a big deal about Dick Cheney's pursuit of power, but what is power without purpose. Did he actually want anything besides it? I'm not sure this movie found the answer to that question.

The most chilling thing about Cheney is that there might be less to him than you would think. I watched Errol Morris' documentary interview of Donald Rumsfeld and was absolutely taken aback by the utter lack of seriousness and self-introspection in Donald Rumsfeld. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney go back a long way, Cheney basically learning the ropes of Washington from Rumsfeld. Was Dick Cheney like Donald Rumsfeld? Can he really be explained by a scene in the beginning of Vice in which a hungover and bruised Cheney is read the riot act by his wife and told that if he does not make something of himself she will leave him. To gain power to keep his wife, is that the sum total of this man's ambitions. What a scary thought.

Adam McKay does not seem to agree. I think McKay's politics are provoking him to seek some more nefarious answer to that question. So the movie makes much more sense in its first half when Cheney is an underdog more defined by a simple pursuit of power than in the second half when Cheney gains power and pursues many of his controversial policies like war and torture. McKay hasn't achieved insight into Cheney motivations, but he is assuming that something more is there. Maybe, maybe not.

The performance in Vice are damn near perfect. Christian Bale may seem a not obvious choice to play Dick Cheney until you see him onscreen for five seconds and you realize its the perfect casting choice. As a matter of course, he seems to have gained like fifty pounds to do this role. All in a days work for this man. This is a much better version of Dick Cheney than we briefly saw Richard Dreyfuss give in W.The most perfect choice of casting though belongs to Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. That is some uncanny shit. I remember being unnerved while watching the real Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. I felt the same thing here and think it a stroke of genius to use Steve Carell, an actor who has played famously empty characters before like Brick the Weatherman, to portray Rummy.

Like any half-way decent movie that portrays well-known people, the viewer gets a kick out of who got cast to play whom. Tyler Perry plays Colin Powell. Sam Rockwell plays George W. Bush. Amy Adams plays Lynne Cheney. George W. Bush, bless his big dumb heart, doesn't seem to know what he is doing half the time and is under the unfortunate impression that Rumsfeld and Cheney do.

I like political movies with a point of view. Not only does Adam McKay have a point of view, he is brilliantly angry about it. This movie and The Big Short reminded me of the best movies of Oliver Stone. They take chances, they are vibrant, and they are passionate about the subject matter. Sometimes this really works like when Dick and Lynne Cheney speak Shakespeare. Other times not so. Vice has a narrator who is not really introduced and might not be a portrait of the actual person he is supposed to be. (Noticeably, he narrates this story in a wearied manner, not unlike the narrator in last years War Machine. Is this how Afghanistan and Iraq are to be remembered? As sad slogs.) We do not know who this man is until he gets run over by a car and Dick Cheney as organ donee, receives his heart. The movie argues that Dick Cheney slighted the dead man by referring to his donor heart as "his new heart." I get what the movie is getting at, but heart problems don't seem to be a fair thing for which to criticize someone.

I found Vice to be frequently funny. That does not mean the movie has jokes. This relates more to the skill of the writer/director who consistently finds ways to present information in a clever and efficient manner. I am a big fan of Adam McKay. I look forward to whatever he does next.

Knight of Cups (2/5 Stars)

I don’t like movies that require reading to understand it. I suspect “Knight of Cups” is that type of movie. Specifically it may have been a good idea to read “Pilgrim’s Progress.” It is quoted directly several times. Is this an adaptation of that book? I don’t know, maybe?

“Knight of Cups” was directed by Terrance Malick and ostensibly written by him as well. I say ‘ostensibly’ because the actors seem to be walking in and out of scenes improvising without a script. Malick consistently uses a narrative device somewhat unique to him throughout the film. You have seen him do it before in a movie like “The Thin Red Line.” He employs poetic voiceover over the eye of a wandering camera. It provides a celestial quality to a scene especially those that are hectic and that have the original audio cut from it. This worked so well in “The Thin Red Line,” because the underlying action was very easy to understand. In was a WWII movie that involved an army trying to take a Pacific Island. The voiceover commented on the scene but never needed to explain what was happening. The story was very clear in that respect. “Knight of Cups,” however (and Malick’s last two films as well “The Tree of Life” and “To the Wonder”) employs this device without the simple plotline and the effect is quite different. It feels like it is being used to cover up bad directing in the editing room. There are plenty of “scenes” in which actors walk around improvising dramatic situations in desperate need of some direction. Since everything is cut up and entwined with vines of excess cinematography and voiceover it is hard to tell what they scenes are about, but that may just be hiding the fact that they might not actually be about anything. This movie perhaps means something to Malick but he sure didn’t feel the need to explain it to me.

It’s a beautiful movie of course. The cinematographer is Emmanuel Lubezki, winner of the Academy Award three years in a row. His target this time is Los Angeles and the areas that surround it. The camera follows a writer, played by Christian Bale. He doesn’t look or act successful but apparently he very much is. He is invited and attends many gorgeous parties in lots of mansions. He spends time with an assembly line of models. Among them are Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Frieda Pinto, Imogen Potts, Teresa Palmer, and Isabel Lucas. And I haven’t mentioned yet the naked nameless ones. He has a manager that says something about making him richer than he already is.

Christian Bale does not particulary care about any of this and kind of walks about in a daze. That may indeed be Malick’s point: that this Hollywood lifestyle of riches and easy sex with beautiful women is ultimately unfulfilling. However that brings to mind the biggest question every critic who has seen the movie has had to ask: That is, if Terrance Malick does not like all these beautiful things (architecture and women and everything between), why did he expend so much effort to catalog it in this movie. He very much has an eye for it. One telling example is the Las Vegas roadtrip scenes. Terrance Malick may feel that Las Vegas architecture is fake, unfulfilling, and whatever but he goes about that sentiment in a very confusing way. He makes it look flat out gorgeous and then has Christian Bale walk around it totally unimpressed. This happens several times in the same way until the movie ends without the characters or the world changing in any significant way. 

The fact that Christian Bale is rich and respected, sleeps with many beautiful women, and hangs out at all these great parties will probably inspire envy in the normal viewer not the knowing spiritual yearning of a world weary philospher that perhaps Malick is trying to get at. This is nobody’s fault but Malick’s. It is fair to say the movie is “out of touch.”

I like his earlier work better. It is amazing how many great artists this can apply to. It is cliché but that does not mean it should not be examined. Perhaps it should be examined because it is so cliché, i.e. so common. After all, some artists (say Martin Scorsese or Tom Waits) never stop being great no matter how old they are. So what is Terrance Malick’s problem?

I suspect it follows from being known as a genius and then subsequently surrounding oneself by ‘yes men.’ It helps to have that asshole producer that will direct one to take the audience’s expectations and comprehension abilities into consideration when making your art. When one is making one’s name in the world, one cannot but help having this influence. No studio in their right mind would give a young unproven director money without an experienced producer looking over the shoulder. But sometimes a director gains a reputation for being great and there comes this notion that they can do no wrong and at some point all of their bad tendencies and indulgences flow through. Who was there to tell Quentin Tarantino that he could have an hour and a half of just talking before any action occurred in “The Hateful Eight.” Why doesn’t anybody explain to Michael Bay that action movies should not have running times of over two and a half hours? What the fuck is David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”? What is it???!?

“Knight of Cups” contains every beautiful technique that makes a Terrance Malick movie the unique special thing that a Terrance Malick movie is except the movie part. It’s an important part that movie part. I hope he remembers it next time.

The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”

American Hustle (5/5 Stars)

The feel of this movie reminded me of a great Hall of Fame Rock and Roll concert. You know those concerts where they induct a great musician and all his friends get up on the stage and they play all the great songs songs and everything is great. ‘American Hustle,’ the new movie by David O. Russell feels like that. It has an incredible cast and a plot that allows every actor the opportunity to do some really throw down acting. In essence this movie is acting in that it is about people who are reinventing themselves in order to pull off scams and sting operations. The backdrop of the movie is the late 1970s ABSCAM scandal in which several members of Congress were convicted of taking bribes from an Arab sheik that in reality was an undercover FBI agent. It should be noted however that almost none of the movie is true. The names of the Congressmen are the same but all the FBI agents and con artists are fictional characters. As the movie’s opening subtitle states, “Some of this actually happened.” So expect fiction as a default not the other way around. In terms of storytelling this strategy is an unambiguous success in that it allows the actors to make very broad dramatic choices with their performances without the inherent worry that a movie inspired by real events usually has, i.e. that they are unfairly slighting real people.

The main quartet of actors involves the con artist team of Christian Bale and Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper as the FBI agent, and Jennifer Lawrence as the housewife of Christian Bale. In supporting roles are Jeremy Renner as the main target of the sting, Mayor Carmine Polito, Louis C.K. as Bradley Cooper’s long suffering supervisor, and Robert De Niro as the mobster who appears to get a cut of the deal when the original sting starts getting escalated way out of hand.

This is the third great movie of David O. Russell about redemption and reinvention. “The Fighter” was about a down and out boxer who came back as a champion. “Silver Linings Playbook” was about a manic-depressive fresh from a stint in a mental asylum trying to get his life back on track. “American Hustle” draws from both movies in terms of theme and cast. From “The Fighter” are Christian Bale and Amy Adams and from “Silver Linings Playbook” are Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro. Making their debut in a David O. Russel movie is Jeremey Renner and Louis C.K. It is no mistake that actors in the last two movies were nominated for Oscars (Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro, and Jacki Weaver were nominated. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, and Jennifer Lawrence won) and this movie should be no different. The only question is who gets nominated and who wins because almost every performance is worthy of it.

Christian Bale plays Irving the main con artist. For this role, Christian Bale that most humble/masochistic of actors decided to gain sixty pounds and sport an elaborate comb-over. There are very few actors in movies that would gain an ungainly amount of weight (or lose it!) to portray a fictional character. Perhaps the best thing though about his performance is his willingness to support all his fellow actors. Irving is a soft-spoken kind of guy who spends his time trying to bring everybody else in the cast back from the brink of insane shenanigans. It also helps that he has all that weight because he moves slower than everybody else.

The opposite side of the coin is the manic cocaine-addled performance of Bradley Cooper as the over-ambitious FBI agent that snags the con artists and employs them to catch bigger game. This man is all sound and fury and not so much thinking. Louis C.K. plays his long suffering supervisor and the interactions between the two are some of the funniest in the movie what with Bradley yelling and screaming and Louis C.K. doing the definitive embarrassed put upon Louis C.K. performance. At the same time however, the Bradley Cooper character of Richie Tomaso is the most tragic. I won’t give away how everything turns out but the treatment of the FBI agent says a lot about how David O. Russel probably feels about the ABSCAM scandal in general. It was a bad thing wasn’t it because after all everybody in politics in beholden to money anyway (just not in an illegal way) and what exactly is the point of entrapping people who do not have a history of criminal behavior.

Amy Adams puts in several performances as a stripper from Alburquerque who moves to New York and somehow finagles her way into a job at Cosmopolitan magazine before falling in love with Irving and becoming a British financier with royal connections in their respective scams. After the FBI catches Amy and Christian she pretends to fall in love with Bradley (or does she pretend?) in order to have just one more trick in the bag if things go south. She is playing just about everyone. It is a very bold performance by Amy Adams and perhaps the most complex character she has ever created.

Rounding out the main cast is Jennifer Lawrence, the wildcard. She plays the housewife of Irving whose reckless impulsiveness is guided by the fact that she knows nothing of what is going on. The funniest scene in the movie involves Irving bringing home a new invention, a “science oven,” as a gift from the man he is conning. He tells J-Rentz to not put any metal in it but doesn’t say why. So she puts metal in it almost immediately and microwave bursts into flames all over the house. Here’s the exact quote: “Don’t put metal in the science oven. Don’t put metal in the science oven. He’s always treating me like a fucking child. I do what I want.” BOOM!

As much of a character as anything else are the little details that inhabit the movie: Christian’s combover, Amy Adams revealing dresses, Bradley Cooper’s curlers, J-Rentz furs, Jeremey Renner singing Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah,’ Duke Ellington’s role in two characters falling in love, the thump and grind of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Good Times, Bad Times,’ a trip to the disco with Bradley and Amy, Louis’ story about ice fishing, the Mexican-American Arab sheik, a pool party in the middle of the winter, and the purity and goodness of mayor Carmine Polito and his family. Everything about this movie is exceptional. But above all, “American Hustle” cares deeply about these exciting, fun, and charming people that care deeply about what they are doing and who they want to be. They fight, they laugh, they cry, they sing, they scream, they cheat and tell the truth, and they live and fall in love. It was a wonderful experience to spend a few short hours in their company.

If anything, this will be the Best Original Screenplay of the year. Hands down. It’s great. 

The Dark Knight Rises (4/5 Stars)

Occupying Wall Street, if only

I would say that director Christopher Nolan’s greatest ambition with his Batman trilogy is to make the effort worth his time and talent. Here is a guy who has made some of the best and most original movies of the past ten years (Memento, The Prestige, Inception) and yet finds himself in between each of his better projects having to make yet another Batman picture. He made the first one because he was not yet a famous director. He made so much money that he was practically forced to complete a trilogy. Of course, in this day and age, trilogies are things of the past when more money can be wringed out of the type of fans that feel they are honor bound to “must see” every movie about a character (see Twilight, Harry Potter, Terminator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman).  But with this movie I think we can be certain that Christopher has finally paid all of his Hollywood dues.  From here on out we should be able to enjoy his creative license unfettered by silly comic books

Comic books are silly. They are so silly that almost every trick a serious movie director can throw at an adaptation of one cannot completely overcome the unreality of it all. It takes a great director to come close though and Nolan employs some rather great tricks to get as far as he did.  

First, he has created a true never before scene spectacle by embracing IMAX and physical effects as opposed to 3D and CGI in his action sequences. There is a rawness and realism to physical effects that makes violence feel more visceral than computer generated effects. Compare the fight scenes in this movie with another comic book tent-pole this year, “The Avengers,” and you will see what I mean. There is an element of horror present in the way the main villain Bane, played by art house muscle-man Tom Hardy, goes around beating the shit out of people with his bare hands that is noticeably absent in “The Avengers.” You look at the way he kicks ass and go, “ouch.” It’s good stuff. (On another note, a serious detriment to the effectiveness of the action is the PG-13 rating. Bane twists and breaks a lot of necks in this movie, but these actions are only visually implied and always just off-screen.)  The IMAX is incredible and actually worth paying more money to see (as opposed to say anything but “Avatar’ in 3D). The cool thing is that Nolan is not just using IMAX for cityscapes and sunsets; he is using it for conversations and fistfights. And it isn’t for just a scene; half of the movie was filmed with IMAX cameras. There is more clarity, there is more detail, and it is far grander.

Second, Nolan actively tries to ignore elements of the comic book. Take for instance the character of Selina Kyle, played by Anne Hathaway. In the comic book she is a leather bound fanboy fantasy known more often as “Catwoman.” The name “Catwoman” is not uttered in this movie, nor does Selina Kyle spend her alter ego time in fetishistic leather carrying a whip. Nolan rightly chooses to drop these details and focus on the woman. In fact, he does this with Batman, played again by Christian Bale, as well. There is far more Bruce Wayne in this movie than his alter ego. And it works too. Usually it is the villain that spruces up a sequel because the hero is already established. Not here, Bruce Wayne is a more compelling character than the mysterious Bane. Of course it doesn’t hurt that Bane is never without this breathing contraption that covers his features and masks his emotions and motivations. You need to be able to see evil geniuses without their disguises in order to grasp the understanding needed to truly fear them. Masks are for flunkies like Darth Vader. Keep that in mind as you watch this movie.

Third, Nolan always contains an undercurrent of current political issues in the Batman movies. In the second movie, we had the Dark Knight providing vigilante justice against terrorism using techniques Dick Cheney would deem absolutely necessary. (It is a relief to see a movie tilt right in its politics every once in a while if only for originality’s sake.) In this movie, we have a strong current of class warfare. One of the early targets of Bane is the stock market where he takes several bankers as hostages. Then there is Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who steals from mansions and tells a vacuous billionaire, “There is a storm brewing, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” It would be an incredible and ballsy thing to do and pull off this type of conflict. Here you have Batman, whose alter ego is a billionaire playboy who inherited all his wealth and stature, and on the other side you have Bane, a man born with nothing in what is referred to as the worst jail on Earth. He escapes and builds his army of menial laborers and wayward forgotten youth underground in the sewers of Gotham city till one day he rises up to daylight and takes over the city. Unfortunately even though Bane professes that his many acts of terrorism are acts of class warfare against the greedy and ungrateful rich amongst us, it turns out it is just a cover for more humdrum motivation. Bane wants to simply destroy Gotham entirely. I know, I know. That disappointed me too. It’s a recycled nefarious plot that the movie freely admits is identical to the one in the first movie, “Batman Begins,” except this time the villain is going to try it with a nuclear bomb.

 There is a problem with that of course visually speaking. For those that remember “Batman Begins,” the Gotham in that movie looked and felt like a leaking shit-bucket, something that would actually make sense (using warped logic but still some logic) to wipe off the face of the Earth. You can’t say that of the city in which “The Dark Knight Rises” takes place. There has been a rather grand transformation of Gotham between the years, even more so considering the way the city looked like in “The Dark Knight.” I mean the first place looked fictional, the second place looked very much like Chicago, and this one is obviously Manhattan. The inconsistency is something that might make one wonder just where the hell is Gotham and why can’t the makers make up their mind about it. As far as I can tell, they changed the city to Manhattan in order to service a plot point. They needed a place with bridges to blow up. Again, the problem is that Manhattan nowadays looks unavoidably like a big pile of money. So a story about class warfare could certainly work, but a story about destroying a city because of its wretchedness wouldn’t. I will however give the movie credit in one important respect. It wasn’t the logistical nightmare that “The Dark Knight” was. Bane’s plans may be too grandiose to be plausible but they still followed the internal logic of the character as opposed to the meticulously thought out miracles of foresight the Joker, supposedly an agent of chaos, kept accomplishing.

Let me take a moment to explain what I mean by “too grandiose to be plausible,” because that phrase strikes to the heart of what the problem is with most comic book movies. Nowadays these movies are not simply content to be fun-filled frivolity. Nolan’s Batman trilogy is perhaps the best example. There is plenty of psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning all over these movies. However the schemes of the villains are far too successful to make any sense given how simplistically they are accomplished or on the other hand how simplistically they are brought down. Because of this, the movie gains a feeling of unreality whenever say an entire police force armed only with handguns decides it would be good tactics to charge a line of tanks and machine guns at least fifty feet away from it in a narrow alley (and actually succeeds in doing so). This feeling of unreality tends to undercut all of the psychology, pathos, and Deep Meaning. There’s this great quote from Spiderman. It goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In respect to moviemaking, writers and directors have the power to pull heartstrings, change minds, and make us care deeply for the lives of fictional people. At the same time though, if they choose to commit the viewer to such catharsis, they also have the responsibility to not fill the rest of the movie with contrived bullshit. That means if you want to make me care about Michael Caine crying up a storm, I better not see action sequences that confound the laws of logic or physics or both later on in the movie. I really don’t think that is too much to ask. For the record, “The Dark Knight Rises,” for the most part does not have this problem. It just has it to the point where I cannot say it is a great movie. It isn’t. 

The Fighter (4/5 Stars)

About Mickey who can't get a word in.

Director David O. Russell’s new boxing drama is about the real life Mickey Ward’s fall and comeback to the World Welterweight Championship. But to say it is about Mickey, played by Mark Wahlberg, is to assume something else. It is also about his family: his brother Dickie, his mother and his five sisters. Mickey may as well be synonymous with them as he can hardly ever get a word in whenever they are around. Mickey may be in the ring but he isn’t in charge. Several times he even says, “Dickie taught me everything I know,’ or “I won that fight because Dickie told me what to do.” The problem is that his family is telling him the wrong things to do, like say fight a guy twenty pounds heavier than he is with absolutely no preparation. And then there’s the fact that Dickie is a crackhead and that his sisters really don’t do anything but sit around the house, smoke cigarettes, and agree with their mother no matter how obviously wrong she is. Mickey’s future success depends on ditching his blood and finding other smarter people to tell him what to do. Is this movie anti-family or just the least pro-family movie you’ve seen in a long while? There’s a good topic for discussion after the film. A Gold Star to anyone who has balls enough to take their family to see this one.

The most impressive thing about this movie is that it is full of great performances. Leading the pack is Christian Bale as Dickie Ward, the motor-mouthed, crack-addicted, sparring partner and older brother of Mickey. The effect is almost immediate. The first frame shows Christian sitting on the couch talking very fast and his eyes nearly bugging out of his emaciated frame. I couldn’t believe it. Christian did it again. He completely transformed his body to play a role. For those who unaware, Christian has been putting on and taking off weight for the last ten years as if his body was made of Play-Doh. Take a look at his perfect body in “American Psycho,” which turned into thinnest man outside of a concentration camp in “The Machinist” which turned into the muscled action star in “Batman Begins” which turned into the starving prisoner of war in “Rescue Dawn” which once again turned into an action star in “The Dark Knight,” and is now the skinny shriveled figure of a crack addict in “The Fighter.” To think all he could have been looking like Patrick Bateman (“You can always be thinner, look better.”) all this time. The man has no ego at all. He is pure dedication and self-discipline. His poster and movies should be passed out as inspirational devices in all WeightWatchers. As far as his performance goes in this movie, it is perfect. Dickie looks and talks like he’s on crack and all his self-aggrandized tales of the past and deluded plans for the future pretty much steals every scene. He is being followed by a documentary crew, which he thinks is making a movie about his comeback. In reality they are documenting the perils of crack addiction. Dickie doesn’t get that until about halfway through watching the HBO special. In many ways, Christian is playing against type in this movie. He usually has the role of the boring straight character that holds together a movie like say Batman as opposed to the Joker, or the non-showy magician in “The Prestige,” or Patrick Bateman who isn’t even there. Here he proves that he can play the wild part and yet in perfect Bale style he still does a great job of helping everyone else give great performances as well.

Playing against Dickie for control over Mickey is the new girlfriend, played by Amy Adams, who is also playing against type in one of her best performances. You may remember her as the naive nurse in “Catch Me if You Can,” or the Disney Princess in “Enchanted,” or the timid nun in “Doubt.” Here, she is a hard and fierce barmaid who can hold her own against a very large and loud family. There is an unbelievable scene where the mom, played by Melissa Leo (who I didn’t even recognize until I saw the credits), and the five sisters pack into a four-door sedan and take a trip across town to confront Adams. Then they all yell at each other on the porch while poor Mickey stands around looking like he might have something to say if he could possibly get a word in.  

Every now and then you watch a movie with what is called, “Culture Shock.” This is when you are presented with something that seems real but is so foreign and weird you can hardly believe that real people would be doing it. That happened several times while I watched this movie, but one scene really stood out. One of the main problems with the girlfriend as far as the family is concerned is that she went to college. Now the girlfriend actually never finished college, but to the family that is still enough to condemn her into a snobbish elite that shouldn’t be taken seriously. Specifically they call her an “MTV skank.” Like I said, that sort of thing for me goes beyond merely insulting or absurd and into something like disbelief or confusion. It’s just so out there I don’t know what to think. I actually hesitated writing this review because so much of the movie took place in an alternate universe where people are like that. But hey, that is what watching movies is all about. Perhaps now if I were to be called something worse than an “MTV skank,” for actually finishing college, I wouldn’t be caught completely speechless. Maybe.

The movie takes place in the 1990s. Biopics are becoming pretty recent for someone my age. We also seem to be getting into the era where a movie in a theater is not the first, but the second or third time a story is told. In this movie Director Russell does a very good job of dodging all the other camera crews in the story, first the HBO documentary and then the highly televised boxing matches. The world is becoming such a documented place that we are now watching cameras watching cameras. Who knows where the road goes?

p.s. Now that I think about it, here is the retort. I’ll quote Jack Nicholson in “The Departed” after Leonardo Dicaprio has just finished saying that school is done, out. His exact words: “Maybe someday you’ll grow the fuck up.”

The Dark Knight 07/18/08

Yes, I know, I've got some explaining to do. My decision for giving this film a rotten rating is actually resting on paradoxical sands. If this film was less serious, carried less moral weight, and didn't contain potent messages, I don't think it would be getting a negative review. But the fact that it is serious, that the filmmakers did intend to challenge the viewer with grotesque situations, that they deliberately pulled our emotional strings, and that they decidedly drew conscious parallels with current political situations, should place upon them great responsibility to the viewer. And the fact is, this story cheats. The movie cheats, and despite the great performances, action sequences, and its often noble intentions and ambitions, on principle I will give a bad review. You simply can't take advantage of an audience like this. You can't intentionally persuade people to be moved so deeply on false premises. I compare this movie more with something like 'Silence of the Lambs' than 'Iron Man.' That's how creepy and dark it is. There are reasons why filmmakers are very careful about making Holocaust pictures. The Nolan brothers should have taken a step back and thought it through once more on this one. 
What exactly do I mean when I say a movie cheats? There are many cliche examples (Watch 'Hot Fuzz') like bad guys firing off rounds and rounds of automatic guns and not hitting anything. There's the implausibly tough female, the indestructible man, and who can forget the old 'Oh my god we're about to be hit by train!' Here in this movie is a version of the 'insurmountable enemy,' a villain with such incredible mobility, intelligence, and material at his disposal that any attempt to beat him becomes implausible. The first time we see the Joker he's robbing a bank. He has told his flunkies to kill each other off so he can keep all the loot. By the end there's just him. The next time we see him he's got new flunkies, the police take one of them in. He turns out to be a schizophrenic psychotic. We are told most of his flunkies are. Now I don't have a masters in business management, but how does one run an organization that is intelligent enough to pull off triple crosses, infiltrate and intimidate the entire police and D.A. office, and have enough foresight to do some of the insane things in this picture with a gang of psychotic madmen that have a habit of killing each other off. The thing about the Joker, and these are his words, is that he's a force of chaos. At one point he admits he never has a plan. Where and when he says this is especially ironic. He says this to the new Harvey Two-Face in a hospital that he apparently has just rigged to explode. Keep in mind that like an hour ago, he had been in this abandoned warehouse taking over the entire mob. He set a spectacle by setting 34 million dollars on fire. The money's in this big pyramid, which someone had to take days to build. Who? Who knows. Not the Joker because he's been taping himself in some penthouse torturing policeman. In just a few hours after he blows up the hospital, he somehow sneaks 100 barrels of oil and a couple bombs into two ferries. He figures out how to stop their engines, take over the PA system and cast forth dire messages all from some abandoned skyscraper, where apparently he found time to take hostages and dress them up as clowns to perform yet another double cross on police snipers who would have no idea where to find the Joker if it hadn't been for Batman's top secret surveillance techniques. Therefore Joker must have super intuition or super paranoia to prepare himself for things he logically should know nothing about. My point is that this guy has to be some sort of super genius at logistics and coordination to pull any of this off. Does that reconcile with Heath Ledger's portrayal of a chaotic madman?
Commissioner Gordon may be a nice guy but he's a horrible police chief. His hapless cops go around in SWAT patrols getting completely blind sided by the Joker's forces, losing to them most of the time in direct confrontations. I wonder where The Joker is getting the manpower to do these things. I wonder where he gets big rigs, garbage trucks, and a vast number of empty warehouses. How does he know exactly where to trip up a helicopter? If I wasn't mistaken, half the criminal underworld was jailed early in the picture. Who are these people? There is also a bigger question of how they get paid, what with the Joker's penchant for lighting all of his money on fire. 
In a lesser movie this sort of thing wouldn't matter as much. But 'The Dark Knight' is rife with deep scenes and a couple grotesque situations that shock your conscience. I glared at the screen hoping the makers of this film didn't have the gall to blow up a ferry full of people in a PG-13 film. By that time, I wouldn't be surprised if they did. There was a couple of scenes that reminded me of the 'Saw' franchise. There's a particularly cruel one in which a newly engaged couple are tied to chairs in different places. In front of them is a time bomb and a radio. This way they can conveniently weep to each other as they are waiting to be blown to kingdom come. At least this movie had the taste not to show any real torture, but still we get to hear about it. The Joker explains how he got the scars on his face. The stories are decidely untrue, he changes it every time to befit the situation. Whatever is more horrifying. My God, is he one fucked up dude. 
The Dark Knight can conveniently be linked with current political situations. I think it is meant to. The Joker represents forces of evil in the world, Islamic Jihadists come to mind. We don't understand them, we don't know what they want. We can't negotiate with them or buy them. We don't know where they come from, or how they gain the ability to do what they do. Batman here goes through a change, he can't be a willy nilly super hero like Superman. He, as Dick Cheney would say, needs to turn to the dark side to beat the Joker. We see a city wide, highly illegal, super surveillance machine. Batman represents vigilanteism, secret covert action, a necessary evil. He's rough with the bad guys. He throws the Joker around in the interrogation room. I very much expected him to go through with some sort of 'enhanced techniques' in there. As Commissioner Gordon says at the end, Batman isn't a true hero. He doesn't represent our values or wishes. We are waiting for the day when we no longer need someone like him. He is simply the hero we need for these hard times. Wow, what a bad message. 
I have yet to get political in my reviews, but this movie necessitates a certain dialogue. So I myself will delve into the dark side to give the counter argument. I think this movie illustrates perfectly the mindset of many Americans that is simply wrong. The fact that we feel, as a nation, a need to delve into the dark side ourselves is because we have a strong misconception of the enemy. We think who we are up against is a form of the Joker. But what this movie illustrates if you look at it closer, and pick it apart like I have, is that an enemy like the Joker is conceivably impossible. No matter what the morals are, we have to admit that flying several different planes into several different buildings at the same time takes a certain amount of logic and coordination. These people are not chaotic psychopaths. They are rational beings that have a great deal of foresight, and to some extent, good management skill. It does no good to label them as crazy, evil, or cowards. That's a fundamental misinterpretation of our problem. Suicide bombers need bombs and paychecks. Like everyone else they eat, drink, and sleep each day, most have families, and all of them have a cultural history. If you understand what that is, then you have gained enormous insight into how they work and what rules they follow. The Joker knew Batman's rules and exploited them tragically. We have yet to figure out how the Joker ticks and he still frightens and confuses us.