STOKER

Over the past decade or so director Park Chan-Wook has been the crown jewel in South Korea's cinematic boom. Most known for his Vengeance Trilogy, Park has a knack for his ultra-violent tragic plots, complex, flashy visuals, and characters who have, at best, a messy moral compass. Now comes Stoker, his English language debut, a mad confection of Gothic, Noir elements, which at its heart is a coming-of-age story about a young girl dying to become a monster.

The girl is India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska). The film opens on her 18th birthday as she learns of her father's death in a mysterious accident. At the funeral, she sees a man watching from the distance. The air ripples around him. He looks like he could be a specter or a mirage. At the reception the specter introduces himself as Charlie (Mathew Goode), a heretofore unknown uncle who has supposedly been traveling abroad for the past couple decades.

India is acutely suspicious of Charlie, particularly as people in her life start disappearing and freshly dug holes start appearing in the yard, but she's not terribly upset. There's something cold and reserved about her. Charlie might be a murderer and his increasingly inappropriate relationship with India's mother (Nicole Kidman in a wonderfully fragile performance) proves that he is certainly a master manipulator, but India is hardly a babe in the woods either. There's something dark in her that was once kept in check by her father and those frequent hunting trips he took her on, but is now running wild and unchecked with Charlie around. She doesn't care who killed her father, or about revenge, she's just caught up in the thrill of the hunt and satisfying her own longings.

Intriguingly perverse characters aside, the set-up threatens to be too familiar for its own good. In the hands of a lesser director, Stoker might have been a simple genre exercise resting too heavily on its Hitchcockian heritage, but Park is far too advanced a director for that. Instead he goes for broke imbuing the film with the kind of gonzo visual symbolism he's best known for. There's a running thing with spiders, piano's, spherical objects that are somehow linked to peoples animal nature not to mention a lot of kinky business with a leather belt that would make Freud blush.

Park sets up and repeats these images in subtle ways across the film. He'll also repeat certain scenes in a plainly contradictory form till we have no idea what is India's flashback and what is her increasingly sexual fantasy life. Park is also a master of intercutting. Durring one sequence he intercuts four or five different scenes, some of which may be flashbacks, another being narration from a nature documentary. But for all these complex scenes, there are also moments of touching simplicity. Look at another scene where India mourns her dead father by gathering the 18 pairs of shoes that he had given to her every year for her birthday. Park fades to each progressively smaller pair in way that makes them look like they're melting into each other as her psyche melts into a more childlike, animistic form.

Absolutely glorious cinema

I understand that at least some of these virtuoso sequences are in the script by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller, but the complex execution and tone is classic Park. The film isn't clean cut about anything. It's all right angles and ambiguity. In anyone elses hands it might have fallen apart, but Park keeps the fever dream together while steering clear of a cliche Gothic Horror look with tremendous results.

For whatever reason, it can sometimes be tricky for foreign directors to make that first American film, particularly after becoming established in their own countries. Language can be a problem when working with actors, American sized budgets can mean a lot of restrictions in terms of content and then there are cultural differences. Those issues have defeated some great directors such as Truffaut and Wong Kar-Wai. It's likely that Park's contemporary Kim Ji-Woon faced all three issues earlier this year with with the critically maligned Arnold Schwarzenegger comeback vehicle The Last Stand.

But Park has navigated most of these issues successfully. Stoker is a uniquely striking, poetic slice of gothic horror. It's got some strong performances, some great music and remember opening credit sequences? Stoker's got a wonderful one. Perhaps the film is not in Park's top tier of masterpieces, but it's still a bold, distinctive tale of the darkness at the center of a young girls heart.

Grade: A-

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LOOPER

It’s 2044. Joe (Joseph Gorden-Levitt) is standing in a cornfield, looking at a pocket watch with nonsensical symbols. At the appointed time a second man appears out of thin air with a bag over his head. Joe shoots the man dead and burns his body. Joe does this sort of thing all the time. He is a looper, a specialized assassin who kills people sent back from 30 years in the future, where time travel exists and is controlled by the mob.

His life is glamorous. The money is good, there are fast cars, women and drugs. This is fortunate for Joe as it seems that 2044 has suffered an economic apocalypse. One day, Joe gets a looping assignment but the man who appears is himself from 30 years in the future (Bruce Willis). This happens sometimes, it’s known as “closing the loop.”  Upon being confronted with his future self, he hesitates just long enough to let old Joe get away and the chase is on. In another movie, Joe would wrestle with the idea of having to kill his future self, but Joe knows what happens to people who fail to close their loops. 

To reveal anything more would be unfair. Also it would take too much time. There is a lot going on in this movie. Writer-director Rian Johnson (Brick, Brothers Bloom) has created one of the most intricate sci-fi universes to come along in a long time. There's something interesting going on around every corner. It’s also admirable that he has the confidence to not explain too much. Much like Star Wars or Blade Runner, a lot of the details and ideas are left for the audience to pick up on and fill in for themselves. Personally, I was fascinated by this idea of this future society using the past as something to exploit, as a dumping ground for its problems. It was as if 2044 was the subjugated colony of 2074. The future mobsters (I love saying that), even send a viceroy named Abe (Jeff Daniels in a hilarious performance) back in time to run the looper operation and keep them in line.

Another admirable thing about this film is its willingness to let its protagonist be an asshole. Both versions of Joe do reprehensible things to survive in this film, which is fine when it's justified, but though old Joe is given a pretty reasonable out, he would rather continue on a very violent path for the most selfish of reasons. It’s fun watching a film where your allegiance to the protagonist and antagonist switches back and forth, and even more fun knowing that they’re really the same person.

Both stars do wonderful jobs in their respective roles. Between this and Moonrise Kingdom, Willis seems to be on a bit of a roll. Levitt wears some light prosthetics to make him look more like a young Bruce Willis. From the side the resemblance is uncanny, but from the front it seems like he used too much filler on his eyebrows. Who knows, maybe that’s just how the kids wear their eyebrows in 2044. Anyway Levitt is excellent, he’s picked up a lot of Willis’s mannerisms, the sarcastic apathy, the lack of eye contact with authority figures, Levitt’s got the Bruce Willis thing down.

Ever since Rian Johnson broke out with his 2005 noir masterpiece Brick, he's been positioning himself as one of our most important young writer-directors. That he chose to do a sci-fi action thriller is commendable. His intricate world building and stylization suits the genre quite well, I hope he does more stuff like this. Lord knows the genre needs more auteurs as talented like Johnson.

Grade:A-

KILLER JOE

Often in Noir, we meet characters with a somewhat skewed moral compass who commit one terrible, immoral act, far beyond the pale of what any of us would normally consider. The characters in William Friedkin's Killer Joe start there and graduate to progressively greater moral compromises.

Take Chris (Emile Hirsh) for example.  Chris is one of those perpetually troubled noir protagonists. He’s a screw-up drug dealer in debt to people who have run out of patience. It just so happens that his no good mother has a fifty thousand dollar life insurance policy. Let he who is without sin, etc, etc…. Chris enlists his father (a scene stealing Thomas Haden Church) to help hire Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey), a Dallas Detective who moonlights as a murderer for hire. Since they’re broke and Joe likes to be paid in advance, Joe decides to take a retainer, Chris’s younger, virginal, mentally ill sister Dottie (Juno Temple).

Most films are content to have only one Faustian deal, Killer Joe has two. For those keeping count, Chris has Joe  "courting" his sister as a down-payment on killing his mother. No one in the film has a problem with the 'mother' part, but Chris grows more and more uncomfortable about the 'sister' part. He tries to call it off, but things spiral out of control and Joe tightens his grip on the family, and the whole thing climaxes in a darkly comic chicken dinner destined for bizarro infamy.

The key word there is 'comic.' The advertising campaign for this film seems intent on hiding the fact that the film is just as much a parody of Noir as it is a Noir itself. Balancing these contradicting tones would derail a lesser director but Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) and screenwriter Tracy Letts (adapting his own play) bounce between the nuances with the deftness of a depraved Elmore Lenard.

The cast does a good job with very tough material. Hirsh is grounded enough to sell the ‘let’s kill mama’ plan as almost reasonable. McConaughey channels a sort of Robert Mitchum coldness and intensity. His scenes with Juno Temple are of particular interest as we watch two very different forms of madness co-existing in the same space. She's a Femme Fatale, but not in any conventional sense. Also, while no one in the cast is undeserving of nomination, Gina Gershon probably wins the Good Trooper Award as Haydon Church’s new wife.

The film is rated NC-17 and with good reason. It's designed to provoke and shock. There are a lot of good laughs in this movie, but if you wanted to take a bath afterwords, I wouldn’t blame you.

Grade: A-

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES AND THE TRILOGY BELT

For many The Dark Knight Rises the most eagerly awaited film of the year. Its predecessor was one of the most well liked action films of the last decade and everyone want’s to know if Christopher Nolan has done the impossible and topped The Dark Knight. In part one of this series, I theorized that a trilogy that measurably topped itself with each entry would win a sort of trilogy belt. We’ll get to that, but first lets talk about the film itself.

It’s been 8 years since the catastrophic events of The Dark Knight. Hero district attorney Harvey Dent is dead, and Batman has taken the fall for his crimes. A law passed in the wake of all this has rendered Gotham essentially crime free, but for our heroes, things are not so good. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is racked with guilt that he’s had to protect the legacy of a man who tried to kill his family. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) is even worse. He’s got a bum leg and wanders around his once great mansion in a Howard Huges like solitude. Bruce is going to need all the help he can get because a new enemy named Bane (Tom Hardy) has moved into Gotham’s sewers with a secret army of mercenaries and one of the most diabolical evil plans to come along in a long time.

The film starts off a bit slower than its predecessors, taking a wider view of Gotham city. The slow burn nature of the plot feels necessary after the anarchic chaos and implication heavy ending of the last film and while not all of the plot’s multitude of moving parts work (the McGuffin is introduced very messily), the slower buildup gives us a better idea what Gotham, this city Bruce cares so much about, is like. We meet a young beat cop John Blake (Joesph Gordon Levett) who does a lot of the legwork putting the mystery together. We also meet Selina Kyle, A.K.A. Catwoman (Ann Hathaway), a mysterious cat burglar who knows more about what’s going on than she lets on.

Ultimately things get really dark. Without giving too much away, Gotham eventually becomes a dystopia of sorts. There is massive social upheaval and class warfare, but it’s not Occupy being invoked so much as the Reign of Terror, complete with kangaroo courts. The films have always had some sort of political subtext but it’s a shift in away from the Bush era Ends vs. Means undertones of the last few films. The second half of the film still plays out like the worst nightmare of the War on Terror generation. As such the film looses some moral ambiguity but surprisingly, it isn’t missed too much.

The actors all do a nice job. All the major supporting characters return and do a fine job even though some of them have less screen time. People who are bothered by Christian Bale's bat-voice will still find no relief. The new players acquit themselves well. Ann Hathaway is the best new addition and plays Catwoman as something of a female Han Solo. Tom Hardy was the perfect choice to play Bane. Hardy is an actor with excellent control over his physicality which is useful here as he needs to imbue a character who’s face is completely covered with a cold intellect.

Ultimately this is a better film than then it’s predecessors. It succeeds where Dark Knight stalls. There are no clunky action scenes and it seems that Nolan has, at long last, truly arrived as an action filmmaker. The film is full of beautifully done, lip biting sequences. The mid-air extraction that opens the film may be the greatest Bond style prologue ever captured on film. The siege of Gotham sequences at the end of the film make for some incredible, silent movie epic level spectacle that makes Avengers look like a mid-budget indie film.

Beyond showing us that Nolan has finally, unquestionably nailed his action scenes, Nolan has also grown as a dramatic filmmaker. The first half of the film has some legitimate issues, but Nolan builds to one of the best constructed third acts he’s has ever done. More importantly the film has an earned emotional resonance that hasn’t been present in his work since Memento and perhaps The Prestige. The tragic elements in this film work on an emotional level where as the same elements of the last film felt a little too “thesis statement” for my taste.

As for whether or not Rises is better than Dark Knight and earns the so-called trilogy belt I theorized about in part one of this series, the answer is a firm, absolute “debatable.” Rises is a better film than Dark Knight, but ultimately I’m not sure I like it more. The antagonism between Batman and Bane isn’t as intense as it was between Batman and Joker. That said, I don’t think it was meant to be. Joker’s plan was to expose Batman and his allies as frauds. For Bane, Batman is a minor concern. Someone to be gotten out of the way and that has a massive impact on the dynamic of the film. It’s not that the later approach is worse, but it’s different and it reveals that the city of Gotham is the real main character in the film. Then there is the ending. Without spoiling it, the finale takes a few unexpected directions. They are not bad directions and they are set up very well, but your satisfaction levels may vary.

The more I sit with this film, the more I like it, but I don’t like it enough to award it a Trilogy Belt, but that’s okay. The trilogy goes out with a bang and brings the series to a memorable and satisfactory conclusion. The Dark Knight Rises isn’t the film we wanted, but it’s the film we deserve. 

 Grade: A- 

Note: About 70 minutes of the film was photographed in IMAX and undisclosed percentage of the remainder was shot on traditional 70 mm film and the results are breathless. Seeing the film in the format, to the extent that Nolan uses it is a great treat that should be enjoyed by anyone who can. In an age where the industry is shifting towards lower resolution digital photography, it's reassuring to see Nolan moving the other way towards sharper, brighter, bigger images.

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Entries in this series:

Intro /Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight Rises 

THE DARK KNIGHT AND THE TRILOGY BELT

There’s a lot of hype and trepidation about The Dark Knight Rises as to whether or not it will conclude the trilogy with a bang or a whimper. If he does, Nolan will be the first director in 50 years to create a trilogy that tops itself with each entry. Such a feat is akin to a world heavyweight championship of film, to the winner goes the trilogy belt (explained more fully in part one of this series).

Nolan has more than history working against him, he also has the 2nd installment of his trilogy, The Dark Knight,which whatever its flaws is certainly one of the most unique and relentlessly entertaining blockbusters of late.

It’s been a year since Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) took up the mantle of Batman and hit the streets of Gotham to start a war on crime. In his crusade he has joined forces with Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman) and the newly elected DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckheart) who's currently dating Bruce's love interest Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal). Batman and co. have had some solid results. Together they’ve managed to deprive the Gotham mob of its accountant and along with him go all their finances, but there’s a new complication in the form of the Joker (Heath Leger), a punk rock, psychotic super crook bent on nothing less than the obliteration of Gotham’s soul.

Complication is the key word of Dark Knight. The film is a relentless series of horrors. The highly episodic plot never slows down. A great villain exists to put the hero through the ringer, Nolan understands this and treats the film like a Shock & Awe campaign, never letting the audience get comfortable. Many films use a sort of ticking time-bomb to accelerate the 3rd act. This film seems to have them every five minutes. Joker issues an ultimatum that people will die every day Batman doesn’t reveal his identity. Later, two main characters are kidnaped and Batman must choose who to save. Joker orders the city to kill a man in an hour or he blows up a hospital, etc. This tactic makes the film a wonderfully nerve racking experience. Every time you think Joker has run out of evil schemes, he pulls something even more diabolical out of his hat. The fact that the film doesn't collapse by the end or run out of juice is a huge testament to how well much of this film works.

What doesn’t always work is the drama. Dark Knight is ultimately supposed to be a tragic film about men who pin all their hopes on an all too human savior. This is all very thoroughly explained to us in the films worst scene where Bruce, Rachel and Dent sit around a table an talk to the audience about the films themes. It’s a shame that a film with such an ingenious structure has to resort to such condescending exposition. Also the tragic parts are underwritten. Perhaps I’m too familiar with the comics to be surprised about what happens to Harvey Dent, but I still should have felt something. It’s as if the characters invest more in Dent than the film is able to. It’s not as if the film doesn’t have time, Dent is on screen long enough, but that thread only works on an intellectual level and not necessarily an emotional one.

Nolan’s technical skills took a measurable step up with this film. He starts to play with sound in interesting ways. Being an action film, there are naturally a lot of loud bangs, but Nolan contrasts this by dialing back at times to the point that there are snippets of complete silence that really force us to look more fully at the image. Those images are better than ever, he and his cinematographer Wally Pfister have sharpened their visuals a lot for this film. The last film made a huge jump towards "realism" but still had a foot in the overly designed world of the old Batman films (the trains, the backlots). Dark Knight makes more extensive use of location shooting (mostly using Chicago as Gotham) and it really works like gangbusters.

Nolan’s ability to conceive and shoot action sequences has improved measurably. There are some memorable show stoppers here. The opening bank heist and the extraction of the mob accountant from Hong Kong are particular standouts. But while Nolan’s ability to edit these scenes aren’t always up to snuff (this video goes into excruciating detail as to why), they’re still extremely effective on a visceral level. The fist fights are better photographed this time out. The camera has been pulled back and you can actually see Batman hitting people this time. That said, there are still some clunkers. Late in the film there’s a gimmick involving sonar vision. Now there are some gadgets in these films that are totally plausible (sky hook), and some stuff that it’s better not to think to hard about. Of the later group, Batman’s sonar vision strains credibility the most. Worst of all it’s an ugly, disorienting gimmick that really detracts from the enjoyment of the film.

This whole scene is a headache.

Now whereas Batman Begins was an example of the superhero formula done about as well as it can be done (despite some flaws). The Dark Knight is all about changing perceptions of the genre. Dark Knight has very little to do with the standard superhero movie. It’s much more like a crime film that happens to have a superhero in it. It’s clear that it’s not Iron Man but film’s like Micheal Mann’s Heat that are the film’s closest cousin. Now in comparison to Heat it doesn’t quite measure up, but it’s a relatively fair fight most of the time.

One of the things evening out the playing field is Heath Leger as Joker. It's been 4 years since Dark Knight came out so there's nothing really left to say about the performance other than wowie wow wow! It's a very twitchy performance but his intense, calculating gaze keeps him down to earth. Also it's just an interesting character, he isn't evil just for the sake of it, he's an armchair shrink out to prove his theories of human existence and shake up the established order. Most of all he wants to expose Batman as a fraud. The thing is, Joker is kinda right. As the film goes on, Batman seems more and more willing to cross lines to stop Joker. Like Dirty Harry, he tortures suspects, breaks legs, even wire-taps the entire city and barely stops for a second to consider it. Like in the last film, he also has to decide if he's going to go all the way and become a murderer. (Spoilers for that 1 person who still hasn't seen this movie) First, he throws Joker off the side of a building but saves him. This is an improvement over his behavior in the first film where he left Ra's Al Ghul to an almost certain death. Perhaps he felt that he would have been more directly responsible for Jokers death seeing that it was him who personally threw him. Or perhaps Nolan didn't want to reenact the ending of Burton's '89 film too closely. Later, after the Joker has been apprehended, Batman learns that Dent has gone insane and has kidnapped Gordon's family. In that scene Batman finally, explicitly, directly kills someone. We can argue that it was justified, but again, the point is that Batman breaks his most important rule and he'll have more trouble rationalizing it this time, and even though Batman finds a way to salvage some dignity, it's very clear that Joker has essentially won. Batman gets torn down, he breaks his rules, loses his objectivity and discipline and even worse his legacy as a force for good is ruined. Batman finds a way to salvage a win, but it feels like a hollow one. (end spoilers)

The dramatic elements of Dark Knight are sometimes hit and miss, but Nolan still manages to tell an amazingly entertaining yarn. Like Begins, it feels a little essayish at times but is emencely entertaining with some interesting moral quandaries. It's a superior sequel that elevates the genre. 2008 was an important year for the comic book movies, Dark Knight and Hellboy II ushered the super-hero genre into more ambitious, more adult territory. It's a shame that the rest of the industry hasn't followed suit.

Grade: A-

Entries in this series:

Intro /Batman Begins

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight Rises

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BATMAN BEGINS AND THE TRILOGY BELT

There's been a lot of excitement and trepidation about The Dark Knight Rises. Rotten Tomatoes has suspended comments on reviews because fans have been threatening critics who dared to not like the film. It's a bit presumptuous of fans to critique a review of a film that isn't even out yet, but the urge is understandable. Christopher Nolan has, over the past few years, completely redefined the superhero genre with his Batman films, and as fans we want him to blow us away one more time with this final entry, but we have a secret fear that it might not succeed. Over the next few day's we're gonna talk about Nolan's batman films, but first lets talk about trilogies...

Making a great film is hard. Many films that start out good seem to run out of steam and then by the end just feel perfunctory. The problem of keeping consistent quality escalates ten fold when dealing with trilogies. Making one great film is hard enough, making three interlinking ones is next to impossible. Most often any sequels are a series of diminishing returns (Back to the Future). Other times the first sequel is even better than the original installment but then the disappointment of the final part seems to leave ultimate greatness just out of reach. Take the original Star Wars trilogy. The first one is quite good. It dazzled the world with a whirlwind of stylistic, genre bending influences that preempt Tarantino by a good decade. Then Empire Strikes Back went deeper into the world and told a more emotionally resonant story. But then Return of the Jedi came out. It’s a good film, and it finishes off a lot of the lingering questions left from previous entries, but it’s just not as good as Empire.

This same pattern has been seen again and again in film trilogies, notably in Sam Raimi’s Spider-man films and perhaps most infamously with the Godfather films. Now the Godfather films are not failures, they represent two wildly impressive achievements in cinema. But what if the trilogy didn’t fizzle out? What if all three volumes escalated in quality? A trilogy that did this, that started strong and topped itself with each entry would be a huge achievement in cinema. With so many trilogies out there and so many film-goers actively interested in the results, one might call it the world heavyweight championship of film. To the winner of this prize would go the trilogy belt.

Like this, but for movies.

Having come up with this theory, I looked around for clear winners.  Now this theory is more for fun than anything else, but there are some rules applied:

1. Escalation of Quality.  The series has to start strong and each successive volume must be measurably better than the last. This excludes Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films as they are of such a consistent quality that choosing one over the other becomes a matter of personal preference.
2. It Must be a Trilogy. There must only be three installments in the overall series with a definitive resolution. Sorry to Star Trek II-IV which tell a self contained story but are part of a larger series (they would also not pass rule 1 as Star Trek III is not as good as II or IV)
3. No “Loose” Trilogies. The installments can tell standalone stories but must be connected in some concrete way, preferably following the same characters or sets of characters. This sadly excludes Park Chan Wook’s excellent Vengeance Trilogy or Spielberg’s supposed Running Man trilogy. In short, if you have to be told that it’s a trilogy—it’s not.
4. Continuity of Creation. All three installments must be said to be the work of one man, or at the very least, the same team. This disqualifies the Bourne films which switched directors after the first film, though it’s on the bubble because the films can be said to be authored by screenwriter Tony Gilroy who invented his own world rather than use the contrived doorstops he was supposed to be adapting (it’s all a moot point as a fourth Bourne film is coming out soon without it’s main lead, taking it out of compliance with rules 2 and 3).

Applying these rules to the great trilogies I find one, and exactly one, trilogy that satisfactorily meets the requirements. Sergio Leoné’s Dollars trilogy.

Started in 1964, A Fistful of Dollars is an engrossing western re-appropriation of Akira Kurosawsa’s Yojimbo (itself a reappropriation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest). Fistful is an excellent film that reinvigorated a dying genre but its sequel For A Few Dollars More tells a more complex, more ambitious, and more rewarding story. The final installment in the trilogy, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is a great, lightning bolt from the sky masterpiece that makes the first two look like field sketches for a great painting.

 It’s been nearly 50 years since that series concluded and no trilogy has managed to stick the landing and deliver on that promise of escalating quality. Of the incomplete trilogies out there right now, two can be firmly said to be in the running for the Trilogy Belt: Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy films and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy which we will be discussing here in a sec. Both films had entertaining but, flawed first installment’s and dynamite first sequels. The possibility of Hellboy III being made at all is very much up in the air at the moment, leaving it up to Nolan. If Nolan, who’s action filmmaking facility took a huge leap forward with Inception, has managed to make the impending Dark Knight Rises better than it’s predecessor he would have won the belt for the first time in nearly 50 years. Over the next few days I’ll be reviewing Nolan’s Bat-films to track their overall quality and post a review of Dark Knight Rises early next week.

Which brings us to Batman Begins...

Until 2005, big-screen depictions of the Dark Knight have had a spotty track record. The ’66 Adam West film is gloriously silly, Burton’s wonderful, but Prince filled, 1989 version was good but seemed more concerned with German Expressionism and Citizen Kane references than being about Batman. Burton’s films had great style but light substance. The Shumacer era was light on anything to recommend. For all the supposed darkness these films had, they seemed to always be harkening back to the campy 60’s era of Batman which was fun (and accurate to the tone of the comics of THAT era) but had little to do with the Batman that Bob Kane created in the 30’s, or the one of the contemporary world. There where some attempts, Darren Aronofsky and Frank Millar (author of two of the most important Batman books of all time, also Sin City) notably worked on a film that would have depicted Bruce Wayne as the borderline Travis Bickle level sociopath he'd be if he existed in the real world. It was a ultimately too bold a venture for a studio that wanted a PG-13, but the idea of a more grounded Batman would eventually gain traction with a different indi-darling director.

Enter Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins which finds Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in a Chinese prison camp. Having left his 1% lifestyle to learn more about the criminal element he yearns to fight against. Call it “method crime fighting.” He’s rescued by a mysterious warrior named Ducard (Liam Neeson), a representive of an ancient order called The League of Shadows headed by the mysterious R’as al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). Under his tutelage Wayne learns all sorts of martial arts as well as the discipline he needs. But when Bruce refuses to kill a man the League has found guilty, he breaks away and Ducard becomes his enemy.

Upon returning to Gotham, Bruce reconnects with a childhood crush Rachel (Katie Holmes) and begins to create a separate persona under which to rescue crime-ridden city. He starts by gathering tools he’ll need from his parent’s company’s Applied Sciences division headed by Q – I mean Lucious Fox (Morgan Freeman). Fox provides him with a bullet proof survival suit, a cape made of memory-cloth for “base jumping” and an old prototype “bridging vehicle” called The Tumbler.  Bruce starts off fighting mob-bosses and quickly graduates to supervillian/shrink Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and his mysterious employers who wish to destroy Gotham city.

It's a lot of plot for one film, but if Nolan is good at one thing, it's finding ways to stuff a lot of plot into a film and make it flow. This is an excellent Batman film. It's true, we've seen origin stories like this before, but never with this level of detail. Where as Spider-Man takes the costume for granted, Begins takes it all seriously. Watching Bruce slowly build the Bat-suit from of off the shelf parts and create his cover identity is honestly more interesting than the actual plot of the film. It's also nice to see that despite all his training, Bruce isn't very good at being Batman at first. He doesn't make every jump he takes and, quite frankly gets his ass handed to him by Scarecrow the first time they meet. We can tell he's on the right track but the film isn't called Batman Knows What He's Doing. It's that constant adjustment to his methods and costume that make the the first hour so good. So compelling are these sequences, that when the full plot finally kicks in, it doesn't measure up.

Now it's universaly agreed that Katie Holmes is the weakest link in the film. Romantic interests have never been the strong suit of Batman stories on the page or the screen. He’s always been something of an asexual character. He’s looking for justice, not love. Still Nolan gives us a love-interest, making her an ADA was a smart choice, casting baby-faced Katie Holmes isn’t. It’s not that she’s a bad actress (she's a blast in Thankyou For Smoking), she’s just horrendously miscast.

But the film has other problems too. Nolan had made only two feature length films prior to this and neither one of them featured the kind of action spectacle required of a film like this. Unfortunately, Nolan's action beats are confusingly put together. I’ve read arguments that the fight scenes in Batman Begins are designed to disorient the viewer, to be impressionistic of how it feels to be attacked by Batman. That’s a good justification, but they resemble the standard 2005 Hollywood style too much for me to completely buy that, and besides at some point I’m gonna want to clearly see Batman punch someone in the face. The action scenes are not bad by any means (the car chase where the Tumbler jumps from roof top to roof top is fun), but they just aren't up to the standard of the storytelling.

What’s interesting about this film is Batman and his incredibly skewed moral compass. Early in the film, long before be becomes Batman, Bruce tries to kill his parent’s murderer. He fails but learns his lesson. later he refuses to kill another murderer because he doesn’t want to be "an executioner." But here's the thing about Batman – He doesn’t kill people, except when he does. The fact of the matter is that Batman’s refusal to kill is a bit of a half-measure in a city as corrupt as Gotham, and in both films, circumstances eventually play out so that he is pushed into doing so. In that executioner scene, Bruce gets out of it by setting fire to the building he’s in. A fire that may very well have resulted in the death of the man he was trying to save as well as several dozen other people. One could argue that he realized that the League posed a threat to thousands, perhaps millions, of lives and that sacrificing a few would be in the interest of the greater good. But that’s the point. Batman is completely inconsistent in applying his moral code. Batman may understand this deep down, but doesn’t want to admit it and it’s intriguing to see how he spins it. (Spoiler Alert) During the film’s climax, he tells R’as al Ghul “I won’t kill you; but I don’t have to save you,” and then leaves him to die in a train crash that he caused. I don’t know what crime Batman would be charged with, but it’s at least manslaughter (End of Spoilers). The huge fascination of Nolan’s films is, despite all the literalism, seeing Batman make progressively more hypocritical choices while still claiming to be a symbol of incorruptibility. We’ll see even more of this in The Dark Knight, and it’s these moral quandaries that make the Batman character special, even more important that he doesn’t seem to mind his obvious hypocritical nature. His flexible nature has served him well so far in the series, but at what point will to start to become a problem?

Now this level realism doesn’t rule the picture. It’s still a Batman film, and a pulpy one at that. The League of Shadows as a terrorist organization was very topical and well done (they even have an ideology reminiscent of Al Qaeda), but it’s still a terrorist organization made up of ninjas using hallucinogenic’s to poison a city. It’s very pulpy in a very old fashion way that harkens back to the characters origins as a thinly veiled rip-off of The Shadow, right down to Batman praying on the fears of his victims. 

Batman Begins isn’t the best possible superhero movie, but it’s done as well the pre-existing, origin story formula can be done. The film’s action sequences may be lacking at times, but the film’s thoughtfulness and attempts to ground the source material in something remotely resembling the real world is admirable and exciting.

Grade: B+


Be sure to follow g-blatt's dreams on Facebook, and check out part's two and three of the series to see how Nolan's Bat-films fit into the Trilogy Belt theory:
Intro / Batman Begins
The Dark Knight
The Dark Knight Rises

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2011)

For several decades, Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger has received in the mail, a frame of pressed flowers for his birthday. Until 1966 they where from Harriet, his niece; afterwords they where from her killer. So opens David Fincher's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a stylish and confident new thriller.

To help solve the case, Henrik hires Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig), an ambitious magazine editor who was recently convicted of libel after trusting the wrong source. After 40 years of investigating the case himself, all Henrik knows is that the killer is someone in the family.

As Mikael begins his work, we also follow Lisbeth Salander (Rooney Mara), a mentally disturbed computer hacker who's being sexually abused by her new guardian. After getting some very bloody revenge, she's hired by Blomkvist as a research assistant and the movie proper starts.

This film deals with some weighty material: rape, fascism, corruption, obsession, and more rape. There is a political undercurrent that's hard to ignore, but it's never preachy, and Fincher gives it to us with all the trademark style he's shown in Se7en, Fight Club, The Game and The Social Network. Beautifully under-lit with echo-chamber sound. Not that this film is as good as those, but it's just as stylish.

With all apologies to the late Stieg Larsson, the plot is the films biggest problem. The structure is not well suited to film. As lurid as it is, the film is a bit dull at first. It takes too long to get going and overall it lacks the transcendent resonance that would put into the very top tier of thrillers. That said, it's better than the Swedish version from a few years ago. It's better put together, lacks the overly sappy ending and isn't as dependent on it's lead performance. Rooney Mara is fantastic as Lisbeth Salander. She won't make you forget about Noomi Rapace (who originated the role to great acclaim), but she's not trying to. The performance is playing a very different note here. Daniel Craig does a lot with his lumpy character, Christopher Plummber is fantastic as Henrik and Stellan Skarsgard has an unforgettable scene near the end I must leave to you to discover.

The main draw of the story is Salander. She is still one of the most fascinating characters in fiction right now. She is tough as nails yet there's something fragile about her. She give no heed to the roles society wants her to play. The world is against her and she is against the world. As interesting as the mystery about Harriet is. The material dealing directly with Salander's world is the most interesting and it's a little irritating that she's sidelined just as the film finds it's footing.

This is a very good film, not as good as should be, but about as good as the material can be without radical surgery to the script. But something about the complexity of the film tells me that I'll like this more on repeat viewings.

Grade: B+

DRIVE

He drives around at night a lot. He gets paid to do that, but you get the feeling that he'd do it anyway. He's a lonely man. So removed from humanity that he doesn't even get a name. The credits list him as Driver. Driver is played by Ryan Gosling (Crazy Stupid Love, The Notebook) who continues to remind us why he's one of the best actors working today. When we meet him, he's driving a getaway car. What follows is one of the most exciting car chases in recent memory. Unlike what we get in something like "Fast Five" it feels real. The movie seems to know how it feels to be pursued by the cops.

Driver is one of those 'By day, by night' types. By day he's a Hollywood stunt driver, rolling over cars and stuff. We know what he does at night. His handler for both jobs is a crusty, local mechanic named Shannon (Brian Cranston). Shannon is bit of a father figure to Driver, albeit an exploitative one, and sees a future for the kid as a stock car racer. Shannon gets a pair of his gangster pals to sponsor the car. The gangsters are played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman. They are an odd pairing, casting wise, but they work great together. Both are menacing but for different reasons.

Early in the film Driver befriends his neighbor Irine, played by Carry Mulligan. The romance that develops is not hot n' heavy. It's shy and tentative, almost chaste. But it's clear that she's bringing something out in him, something that's been hidden for perhaps his entire life. Unfortunately it gets put on hold when her baby-daddy, Standard (Oscar Isaac), is released from prison. In a lesser movie Standard would have been an abusive husband that Driver has to rescue her from. But thankfully, it's not a lesser movie. Standard and Driver become friends, in a way, and Driver offers to help him get out of his mob debt by helping out on a heist. The film heats up considerably from there.

This is a very stylish film. The car chases, while sparse, are utterly fantastic. The film looks great and director, Nicolas Winding Refn, is a master of visual storytelling. He wastes nothing. He doesn't load the film down with too much talking. Driver doesn't speak much, he just does things. As a presence, Gosling walks around like the reincarnation of James Dean or Alain Delon. He chews his toothpicks. He wears his white, scorpion jacket looking like a knight, or a superhero. Of course, he's not really a superhero, he's a man-child with anger issues. It is fitting then, that the jacket gets more and more bloodstained as the film goes on. We don't learn much about him. We don't know if he was born emotionally distant or if he was made that way by some past trauma. I vote for the past trauma. I think the key is a scene near the end where Driver goes to kill one of the main villains. Driver wears a latex-rubber mask he stole from his day job. It's such a dehumanizing mask that it doesn't feel like he's hiding his identity so much as he's building a wall between himself and the world.

I wrote in my review of Bronson that Nicolas Winding Refn would one day direct a great film. That day is here. The problem with Bronson was it's lack of thesis. This film has one in the form of a song, A Real Hero, which plays twice in the film. In Bronson, Refn kept his protagonist at arms length. Here, Driver is keeping the world at arms length, and like that song, he is left to wonder what it feels like to be "a real human being."

Grade: A+