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. 

Invictus (2/5 Stars) January 10, 2010

Lazy writing and poor execution waste a chance to make a great movie.

Clint Eastwood directs and Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon star in this part Nelson Mandela biopic and part underdog sports movie. The movie has three storylines. One is Nelson Mandela’s early decision to keep the colors and symbols of the Springbok rugby team, an almost sacred institution to the white Afrikaners of South Africa and symbol of oppression to the black population. The second deals with Mandela’s security guard, both white and black, and their attempts to get along. The third is the rugby team’s underdog triumph at the 1995 World Cup. The first storyline is well done and inspiring as it should be. The second and third are woefully under-researched, lazily written, and poorly executed. If the 1995 World Cup Championship were a good rugby game you wouldn’t know it from watching this movie. I still don’t even know how rugby is played. 

Morgan Freeman is perhaps the only actor in the business that could play Nelson Mandela in a movie. If I saw any other actor playing the part I would be like, “Why couldn’t they get Morgan Freeman?” He nails the gravitas, the patience, and the greatness of the man. Man, Morgan Freeman could read the ingredients off a can of tuna and it would sound profound. Having him preach reconciliation and forgiveness and recite inspirational poetry is something to behold. These are the best parts of the movie. (It’s also cool that the movie actually shot in the prison Mandela was for twenty-seven years during the reign of apartheid.) It’s a shame that the rest of the movie couldn’t have been better. If there is another movie about Mandela, Freeman probably won’t play the part. 

Apart from Freeman’s performance, the movie is very disappointing. Take the security detail story for instance. There is a tiff at first between the guards because some are black and some are white and they don’t trust each other. But over time they get along. There really isn’t more to it than that. Mandela was never shot at nor was there any scandal in real life or in this movie. This in itself is not bad, but the movie also declines to make any of the guards anything more than one-dimensional characters. They basically make snide remarks at each other for a while and then stop doing so. There is no drama here. The climax to this storyline wasn’t character based or even plot based. It was a false alarm at the rugby championship. A red herring. Though an empty threat would make sense for this storyline.

The worst part of this movie though is the incredible laziness of the rugby storyline. Rugby is never explained or talked about in a strategic sense (even though most people in the USA would not be familiar with the game), none of the athletes on the team are introduced as characters besides the coach Francois (Matt Damon), and the contests are not shot in a way that tells the story of the game itself. In fact, I would go so far as to describe the climatic championship game as B-Roll: a bunch of disconnected shots that if you rearranged them randomly would lend just as much weight to the story. This is the sort of stuff you have your 2nd crew work on while your real director is doing the important things. You have a huge problem when the most dramatic rugby play in the movie is stock footage of the New Zealand team beating England that the characters watch on their televisions. 

I’m not a huge expert on rugby (no thanks to this movie) but I have seen a couple games before. I always got the feeling that it was an incredibly rough, dangerous, badass game. The players are huge and everything is full contact. Does that sound like something you should play an acapella South African tribal chants in the background too? Does that sound like a game that you can win by doing a lot of running through town and visiting historical sites? Would it make sense for the ‘inspirational speech’ of the coach to be but a few sentences with his voice barely raised? I once saw a great documentary called Murderball about wheelchair rugby for cripples. Those rugby players had ten times more balls than this rugby team. I’m sure there were good reasons that South Africa won that year. It seems like it could be an inspiring event that helped unite the country. This movie just does a terrible job at conveying that.

There have been two movies this year that deal with South African apartheid and the reconciliation between the two races. The literal version is Invictus. The metaphorical version was this summer’s science fiction film District 9. District 9 is the better movie and I would suggest it to anyone who would want to see Invictus. 

Gone Baby Gone 10/21/07

Gone Baby Gone delivers on all sorts of levels. Not only is it a crime drama with a complex plot filled with twists and turns, it is also a morality play that asks many questions of the audience. This one will certainly have people asking each other after the credits: Well, what would you have done? Who was right, and who was wrong? This story, unlike many others, requests a thinking audience and although it may not be a classic it is done so well that it deserves the very high tomato meter it got. 
What? what did that credit say? The director is Ben Affleck? no kidding, really? Send a message to Matt Damon, Ben Affleck is starting to catch up. This movie, more than anything, resurrects his career. He has now gained back the credibility he lost (unfairly) during his Bennifer days. And Matt Damon hasn't directed anything yet. This game has suddenly become more interesting. 
The Affleck brothers together seem to have cinematically matured. Casey Affleck has always been a favorite actor of mine. Something about the guy is truly original. I think it's his voice. It comes out as a squeak and when he speaks slowly it sounds like pained and hurt. It is a testament to him that he can hold the stage in this film with great older actors like Ed Harris, and Morgan Freeman. I doubt he'll ever be a major star but I hope to see him headline just a few more movies. 
Overall the movie is incredibly solid and definitely worth a watch. I loved certain things about how the movie was put together. Like the fakeout ending half way through. and the way the movie was edited in the perp's house, how it never became exploitive and was always careful and courteous with the tremendously fragile subject matter.
This movie was adapted by a novel from the same guy who wrote Mystic River. There are concurrent themes in both of those movies, but I think I would rank 'Gone Baby Gone' over 'Mystic River.' In my opinion its a more challenging and believable film.