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

CAMERON ROUNDTABLE: TITANIC

Cameron Roundtable enters the home streak with Titanic, which was the most expencive AND the highest grossing film of all time for a while. Cameron was already "king of the world" when he made it, but this film certainly solidified it. Like anything that big, there has been a bit of a backlash that has dogged the film. I've stayed out of it myself as I hadn't seen the film since I was a kid and it came on HBO.  As always on Cameron Roundtable, we're joined by Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Max O’Connell: Titanic. The film that made all of the money.

Loren Greenblatt: Which is a good thing, because it cost all of the money. 

MO: At this point, it’s the third time Cameron made the most expensive film ever made (Avatar almost made it the fourth, but the record holder is, for some reason, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End). Everyone knows about Titanic, but here’s some background. Cameron wasn’t that interested in making a film about the sinking of the Titanic at first. He wanted to make an underwater documentary about the ship, which he eventually did with Ghosts of the Abyss. He funded his journey by calling it “research” for a dramatic film. Now if there’s one thing you have to respect about Cameron is his ability to make his pet interests into films. The way he took his fascination with underwater stuff and made The Abyss, the way he took his fascination with shipwrecks and made Titanic, his desire to push the boundaries of technology and make Avatar…

LG: It can’t have been an easy film for him to pitch. I imagine it going something like this: “It’s a period piece, it costs $200 million, it’s 3 hours long, there’s no laser explosions, and there’s no sequel.”

MO: It was a gutsy move, and everyone thought it was going to fail. Had it not been the smashing success it was, it would have ruined his career and probably taken down a studio.

LG: $200 million is a lot of money for a movie now, and this is 15 years ago. And it wasn’t the original budget. This thing went over budget and over schedule.

MO: This was a hard shoot. Kate Winslet almost quit after she got pneumonia from shooting in the water. She chipped her elbow and later said that while Cameron is a nice man in the day-to-day life, he’s a monster on set and he’ll never work with him again. Leonardo DiCaprio threw out his shoulder. There were a number of injuries.

LG: We joked that Ed Harris got a call from Cameron and hung up immediately, considering that he nearly drowned on The Abyss.

MO: You can see the influence Cameron had in making this film: earlier in the decade, Spielberg made a full shift into “serious” filmmaker with Schindler’s List: everyone thought the film would fail and that the E.T. guy wouldn’t be able to make a serious film about the Holocaust, and he proved them all wrong. He finally got the Oscar, but not for one of his blockbusters. Then Robert Zemeckis followed him with Forrest Gump, which he won the Oscar for rather than for something like Back to the Future or Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (for the record: I love Schindler’s List, hate Forrest Gump). Cameron should have won the Oscar for directing Terminator 2, but they don’t give Oscars for directing Terminator 2. He instead got it for Titanic. In terms of craftsmanship, though, this is about as stunning as movies get in the 90s. It is also a melodrama in the classic sense: you can see the influences of a romantic melodrama like Gone with the Wind, or something D.W. Griffith might have done.

LG: Basically, the story of the sinking of the H.M.S. Titanic is filtered through the romantic story of two passengers: Rose (Kate Winslet), an upper-class woman about to be married to an evil Billy Zane, who basically plays Snidely Whiplash (they call him “Cal” for some reason)…

One of these is a 3-densional character, the other is played by Billy Zane

MO: And they have the great British character-actor David Warner as his own Muttley, no less.

LG: Rose is very sad because she doesn’t want to marry this bastard, and she’s about to kill herself, but she’s saved by Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a dreamy, dirt-poor artist (though the fantastic drawings were actually sketched by Cameron) who won a ticket on the Titanic.

MO: Plus there’s a framing device in modern day with Bill Paxton basically as a James Cameron surrogate searching for a blue diamond called “The Heart of the Ocean”  (no coincidence!) in the sunken Titanic, and an elderly Rose (Gloria Stuart) might have information because the naked woman in the drawing they find is a younger version of her, and she narrates the movie.

LG: It’s a flashback told from her point of view, even the scenes she wasn’t there for. Eh, it’s a movie. Go with it.

MO: I’ll get ahead of myself, though...Kate Winslet’s Best Actress nomination at the Oscars? Deserved. Stuart’s Supporting Actress nomination? A bit absurd. She’s fine…it’s a tiny role.

LG: She’s a little flat sometimes.

MO: It’s a little maudlin, and she got nominated because she’s an 86-year-old or whatever she was (she lived to be 100 before she died) and she finally got noticed. That DiCaprio didn’t get nominated and she did is ridiculous.

LG: We won’t begrudge her, though. But the two fall in love, it’s a star-crossed romance…it plays out about as you’d expect. I always had a theory that once you passed a certain minute-mark in your running time, you really had to earn that length was narrative density. I forged this theory while watching Goodfellas and Casino over and over again, and you can see someone like Paul Thomas Anderson learning from Scorsese with his movies Boogie Nights and Magnolia. This doesn’t hold up to that theory, but if everyone here was a three-dimensional character it’d be eight hours long.

MO: To be fair, it’s a melodrama. It’s following melodrama conventions with the two great-looking leads from opposite sides of the tracks, the comically evil villain, the rich people who don’t care about the poor, the poor people are…stereotypes, though they’re not as bad as they could be.

LG: DiCaprio has a sidekick we’re told is named Fabrizio, but with his stereotypical Italian-ness we called him, at alternate points, “Meatball”, “Spaghetti”, “Pepé”, and “Chef Boyardee”. “Oh, we’re on the ship-a!. I-a hope it’s okay!”

Fabritzio reminisces about his accordion

MO: To Cameron’s credit, it’s not mean-spirited. It’s not a Lucas stereotype.

LG: It’s silly, but not offensive. He basically talks like Mario from Super Mario Bros. I kept waiting for him to step on a goomba. The rich folk aren’t too much better: they wear monocles and eat caviar and drink brandy with their cigars. They talk about the poor and Rockefeller and their tax investments and OH MY! WHERE IS MY SNUFF BOX?

MO: They’re effective melodrama villains. Billy Zane is pretty fun as Cal/Snidely Whiplash. Rose’s nasty mother isn’t a terribly complicated character, but she does her part just fine. The likable rich people are all played by great character actors (Victor Garber as the architect, the captain, Kathy Bates as Molly Brown).

LG: It’s effective enough. DiCaprio and Winslet are the hook of the film. They have all the chemistry in the world together. They could have been dull stereotypes who are totally vapid and empty.

MO: But the appeal of two great actors doing an old story very well is fantastic. It doesn’t hurt that DiCaprio is incredibly charismatic and charming as Jack and Winslet looks like an Old Hollywood beauty and has that kind of gravity.

LG: They are gorgeous together. One of the things I found curious, though, is Cameron’s dialogue. Because it’s a period piece so he can’t have the ultra-modern one liners…though I noticed Jack has a weird tendency to quote Bob Dylan songs well before they were written.

MO: It’s a bit much. That and the rich not knowing who Freud is or thinking Picasso won’t amount to anything is a bit much.

LG: It’s that scene in Blazing Saddles where the guy goes on about Marie Curie to comically establish period.

MO: But there are some good lines. Bill Paxton and Gloria Stuart’s “I’ll be goddamned” bit is fun. “I’m the king of the world” is rightfully iconic. The romance dialogue is pretty banal, but it’s effective enough, and it’s an old-fashioned melodrama anyway. Go with it, it works. “I’ll never let go” is pretty great as well.

LG: There’s some bad ones as well. “A woman’s heart is an ocean of secrets” is terrible.

MO: Cameron can be awful. But he has some great presences to sell a lot of lines. Now, this film doesn’t have the thematic depth of Cameron’s earlier films.

LG: Nor is the world as deeply thought out. He did a lot of research, and the sinking of the ship in the second half of the film is amazing and filled with some real incidents we know from the survivors. Thematically, it has an interesting pattern. Cameron’s early films have strong women that break through the roles that male-dominated society has picked for them. True Lies and Titanic have women who are forced to navigate male dominated society’s expectations of them. It’s a huge shift in how Cameron depicts women. It’s for worse in True Lies, it works fine in Titanic, but it’s a shift.

MO: Here’s where we’re going to disagree.  I’d argue Titanic is a feminist movie.

LG: I’m not saying it isn’t.

MO: It’s a shift in the pattern, but it’s effective at showing a woman forced to navigate society in a similar way to how Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver were marginalized in the worlds of Aliens and Terminator 2. She does find her independence (through love, but whatever), and she breaks free of societal expectations. It’s similar to the old women’s pictures of Old Hollywood like Gone with the Wind or Stella Dallas. The use of class struggle in this, meanwhile, isn’t terribly deep. It isn’t a Leoné or Coppola movie.

LG: It’s basic movie stuff. Like when the mother forbids the daughter from seeing the cute poor boy, which never works ever. It’s an incentive.

MO: It’s corny, but kind of endearing.

LG: It’s rarely groan-inducing.

MO: What the film lacks in depth, it makes up for in craftsmanship. All of the money is on the screen. He manages to show how technology is both spectacular and limited, and we see how that shows up here. We have a great sense of how the Titanic works, and how it moves, and how its limitations will lead to its undoing. When everything goes to hell, we’ve been given a fair chance to see what’s going to happen.

LG: He does a good job of walking us through how it’s going to go down early in the film with a simulation on a computer graphics walkthrough in the framing device. We know what’s happening, so it’s not just a bunch of stuff that happens when the ship starts sinking. It’s all very well thought out, and Cameron’s a master at set-pieces. The special effects are extraordinary: it feels as if he actually rebuilt and re-sank the Titanic.

MO: And the design is fantastic. It feels like they got the dishes and cabinets and staircases just right on the ship. The details on the actor’s bodies are honestly pretty great as well, like when they sweat during the sex scene or turn pale when they’re in the freezing water. It’s meticulous in a classic Cameron sense.

LG: When you’re given all the money in the world, you better pay attention to what you’re doing. There are some harrowing sequences when the lifeboats go back for bodies. There’s a woman and her infant who are frozen together. It reminded me of how the three-hour-long blockbuster thing has been continued by Peter Jackson. Cameron was absent from films for a long time after this movie, and Jackson’s attention to detail and ability to work on a large scale is similar to Cameron’s. The Lord of the Rings takes a lot of cues from Titanic in pacing out three hours.

MO: Without a doubt. And Cameron’s slow-motion, while sparingly used, is very effective.

LG: He uses it a little differently, though. The slow-motion pans are very effective in the “rich people acting rich while Kate Winslet is disaffected” scenes.

MO: And, as always, his use of contrasting shadows with shafts of light is fantastic. The film has that hard-edged blue is still here. His use of blue-collar characters never feels pandering the way Michael Bay’s films always feel. Bay’s Pearl Harbor (Bay’s worst film) is the film Titanic was attacked for being. It’s pandering where Cameron’s populist instincts are completely in earnest.

LG: Well that film is basically trying to be Titanic.

MO: Titanic’s backlash has been mostly unfair. Some of it is understandable: it was inescapable, and the Celine Dion song is intolerable.

LG: We turned off “My Heart Will Go On”. We weren’t having that.

MO: It’s easy to see why there was a backlash, but the criticisms for it being melodramatic and being about star-crossed lovers rather than the big tragedy kind of shows them missing the point. Cameron earns what Bay does not.

LG: It’s a marvelously made film. I can understand some of the “made up love story against a real tragedy” criticism, but there’s not a cynical bone in this film, which is part of why all the cheesy stuff works. Cameron means every sentence of it.

MO: When the craftsmanship is this good (the sinking ship puts The Abyss to shame), and the sinking of the ship is another one of his great timetables.

LG: Cameron’s use of ticking time-bombs in his third acts of his films are always great. It’s a very effective screenwriting move that makes almost any film more involving.

MO: There are just so many great sequences here. I love the montage with the classical violin piece that everyone seems to remember. The string quartet plays a mournful piece together as we see everyone on the ship realize that they’re going to die. It’s heartbreaking.

LG: It got a little dusty. And then Pepe came back…

MO: But I felt bad for Fabrizio! I really did!

LG: He’ll never get to invent Chef Boyardee.

MO: People complain about that Celine Dion song all the time, and with reason. It’s maudlin and corny. Cameron was opposed to it until James Horner and Celine Dion recorded it anyway, and he ended up liking it.

LG: Why is unclear. Though the song incorporates the melody from the score very well.

MO: The score itself is phenomenal.

LG: Horner did an excellent job, though it does have the unfortunate effect of making you think that song is going to start every five minutes.

MO: I don’t hate “My Heart Will Go On” the same way I hate the Avatar song, though.

LG: When we saw Avatar at the IMAX and that song started, I swear I’ve never seen a room clear that fast.

MO: This song at least has that melody. I think it’s inevitable that we talk about the film’s Oscar success. It had 14 nominations (tying the record held by All About Eve) and 11 wins (tying the record held by Ben-Hur, later equaled by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). Most of the nominations were deserved: I hate the song, Stuart for Supporting Actress was undeserved, DiCaprio got snubbed for actor. But all of the technical awards were deserved, the score is great, Winslet is great, and honestly, I wouldn’t begrudge the film Best Picture, even if it did beat L.A. Confidential. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge Cameron Best Director, this is astounding moviemaking through and through.

LG: What else was nominated?

MO: L.A. Confidential was the best of the bunch, followed probably by Titanic. Good Will Hunting most people like a lot more than I do. As Good As It Gets goes back and forth between being enjoyable, sickly sweet, and unbearably smug. The Full Monty I haven’t seen…

LG: It’s a sweet film, you should check it out.

MO: There were better films that should have been nominated: Boogie Nights, The Sweet Hereafter, The Ice Storm, Jackie Brown. But Titanic’s win isn’t the catastrophe people make it out to be.

LG: No, there’s been much worse…

MO: Forrest Gump, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Crash…but the Oscars don’t matter. No matter the film’s flaws (and it certainly has some), it’s a very affecting film and a very strong piece of craftsmanship, and it’s about as good as modern melodramas get.

LG: I really like this film. Much more than I thought I was going to. I give it an A-.

MO: Same here. It’s his best film outside the big three (The Terminator, Aliens, Terminator 2).

LG: You forgot about Piranha II, Max.

Max’s Grade: A-

Loren’s Grade: A-

That's it for our discussion of Titanic. If you agree or disagree, feel free to post your comments bellow. Check back here for more James Cameron reviews and check out Max's blog, The Film Temple for even more awesome movie criticism, including a review of the David Lynch fiasco Dune

Other Installments in the Cameron Roundtable series:
Xenogenesis 
Piranha II: The Spawning 
The Terminator
Aliens (Special Edition)
Reach
The Abyss (Special Edition)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
True Lies
Titanic
Avatar (Extended Edition)

CAMERON ROUNDTABLE: TRUE LIES

The Cameron Roundtable continues today with our discussion of True Lies. It's an interesting film and ties into this sites ongoing Bondathon series. As always on Cameron Roundtable, we're joined by Max O'Connell of The Film Temple.

Loren Greenblatt: We just finished James Cameron’s James Bond movie. I get the feeling that he was a little worn out after Terminator 2.

Max O’Connell: Well T2 was sort of a wrap-up of all of the themes he explored throughout the 80s, and he handled it better than most of them (better than any, in terms of the nuclear material), so it’s understandable to see him go lightweight in terms of plot. He was also working on the Spider-Man movie that he ended up never making because he didn’t think the technology was up to speed. By the way…he wanted Michael Biehn to play Spider-Man, which I don’t think would have worked at all.

LG: Maybe for an older Peter Parker going for his doctorate…

MO: And at the same time he wrote Strange Days for Kathryn Bigelow, by this point his ex-wife who I think he has a healthy relationship with.

LG: But he basically made a Bond film, and a very good one, to a degree. It’s a remake of a French movie called La Totale!, which neither of us has seen unfortunately. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, a superspy in the 007 mold, he goes around doing spy stuff, but he’s also married to Helen, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, who knows nothing about his job. Also, he has Tom Arnold playing this really annoying partner…

MO: A comic-relief character who isn’t funny at all.

LG: And it’s not a bad premise for a film. He lies to his wife about his job (she thinks he’s a computer salesman), and then he realizes his wife was lying to him about something.

MO: It’s True Lies…a title that makes absolutely no sense.

LG: Just like most Bond films-perfect!. The opening sequence is fantastic: Arnold does everything James Bond ever did in a movie. There’s a gag ripped directly from Goldfinger, where he comes out of the water (hey, a trope!) in a wetsuit  and walks into a high class party in a tuxedo. There’s a number of other Bond-gags: witty banter, there’s an evil Bond girl he dances with that contrasts his wife, he fights with attack dogs, he escapes on a snowmobile…what kind of party has snowmobile guards by the way?

MO: What kind of parties are you going to?

LG: Well I’m not very popular I guess. But it culminates it a great chase where he skis down a mountain into a getaway car. At this point we already know James Cameron does action scenes better than anyone not named Spielberg. It honestly outdoes most of the Bond films, and part of the reason the film was a hit was the fact that we hadn’t had a Bond film in a long time. The series had stalled.

MO: Timothy Dalton wasn't the most popular Bond at the box office.

LG: Plus there where legal disputes. Anyway, there hadn’t been a Bond film in five years and True Lies filled the gap very nicely, and it spoofs both James Bond films, Arnold’s action persona and 80s action movies in general.

MO: Here’s the thing with Arnold: he is not a normal person. He’s a big man, he’s got that thick Austrian accent, and he needs to find roles that fit with his larger-than-life persona. A lot of his best movies play with the fact that he’s not normal: the first Terminator and Conan the Barbarian turn him into a hulking monster. Commando turns him into this ridiculous super-soldier that’s basically Rambo with a sense of humor and less self-important jingoism. Terminator 2 was released after Arnold was a big goofy action star, so he becomes more likable and funnier. Total Recall plays with the idea that he’s not a normal person by sticking him in the real world, having him stick out like a sore thumb, and then telling us that he’s really a super-spy, which really helps that film.

LG: Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the most meta actors in Hollywood. It’s not just that a lot of his films are similar: he actively tries to work in references to his previous films. When he and Tom Arnold go into the superspy headquarters, we get a much better version of the X-ray vision from Total Recall.

MO: Well, the special effects are better because it’s four years later and this tops Terminator 2 as the most expensive movie ever made, around $102 million.

LG: The man has expensive tastes.

MO: Well, for Cameron’s process, it’s not a matter of “play around till we get what’s right for the film”. What he sees in his head is what is going to show up on the screen, and it doesn’t matter how much time it takes. He’s going to get it. It can make him difficult to work with (see: The Abyss, Titanic), but he makes some of the most striking action sequences ever. Pound for pound, True Lies almost tops Terminator 2 when it comes to eye-popping action sequences.

LG: In terms of visceral action beats, True Lies is a one-stop shop. But it’s a much lighter film, and ultimately, as fun as the action scenes are (and they really are a blast), they’re not as satisfying as something like Terminator 2, which had much stronger, relatable characters.

MO: Right. At the end of this film, Schwarzenegger and Curtis’ daughter is brought back after being taken hostage by the terrorists. We have not seen her for about an hour, maybe longer. She’s hostile towards her father, and that’s her character. Eliza Dushku plays it just fine, but she has no chance to make an impression.

LG: And to be fair, many years later she was excellent in Joss Whedon’s show Dollhouse, but she has very little to do here.

MO: The emotional undercurrent is missing here. Arnold and Jamie Lee Curtis have a surprising amount of chemistry in this film, but it’s pushed to the side. The first third of the film barely shows them together. The second third of the film is a catastrophe. The last third shows them together, and it makes me wish that that section was extended to a feature length film. We get to see her get used to him being a superspy, and she comes into her own as a strong female character. Jamie Lee Curtis is a fantastic actress with great comedic chops, and she showed this in earlier movies like Trading Places and especially A Fish Called Wanda. She’s very funny in a lot of this…

LG: Even in the worst scenes, she finds something to work with.

MO: She’s quite good, but as appealing as they are together, there’s not much emotion in their relationship.

LG: We should mention that Schwarzenegger is the light of this film.

MO: He’s great.

LG: He’s very funny, he’s very relatable. A lot of people knock his acting range, but he’s better than people give him credit.

MO: The man can do comedy. He can do comedy like no one gives him credit. It’s unfortunate that most of his straight comedies (Kindergarten Cop, Junior, Jingle All the Way) are unfathomably awful, because he’s a great comedic presence. This film doesn’t just give him great one-liners (“here’s my invitation”, “you’re fired”). The way it lets him look at the camera, give a sarcastic line to the villains, have great chemistry with the evil Bond girl (played very well by Tia Carrere). Cameron and Schwarzenegger have a gift for comedy.

LG: I love Charlton Heston’s cameo as basically Nick Fury. He’s got the eye-patch and scars, and he’s the head of a superspy organization.

MO: The comedy and action are very strong, but the film has a lot of problems, not the least of which is that it’s less intellectually exploratory than his other films.

LG: The film gets into a battle of the sexes when Arnold realizes his wife is lying to him.

MO: In the second act, he learns his wife is possibly having an affair with Bill Paxton, a sleazy used car salesman posing as a spy.

LG: I do find it interesting that she lies to him with cover stories, just like him. It’s the essential metaphor of the film.

MO: Yeah, which could be interesting, but they don’t do enough with that. The thing is that the entire middle section is painfully misogynistic and mean-spirited. It’s nasty and it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all. I found it depressing. Every time I watch the film, I feel my grade dropping when it hits the middle section.

LG: I don’t actively hate that section as much as you do, but it’s not good at all, and it drags the film down, every time Tom Arnold opens his mouth…

MO: He’s terrible.

LG: He calls all women “bitches”…

MO: I’ll actually rephrase that: he has comic timing, but his presence, his delivery, and his material is painfully unfunny.

LG: He’s very concerned with the sexual awakening of Schwarzenegger’s young teenage daughter in a very creepy way. He has a whole monologue about it. It’s clearly a subject he’s put a lot of thought into.

MO: Also, it’s worth noting that Cameron, at this point, is dating Linda Hamilton, so as far as we know he’s happy. Tom Arnold had just divorced Roseanne, and he puts in an anecdote from real life where “the sick bitch even took the ice cube trays”, which is not just unfunny, but it’s nasty towards women.

LG: Every time he opens his mouth, he says something terrible.

MO: “Women: can’t live with ‘em, can’t kill ‘em”.

LG: We could go through a list here, but who has the time?

MO: And he’s not the only sexist character. Bill Paxton’s character is supposed to be, but it’s in the most tiresome way.

LG: Paxton is the sleaziest lothario ever. He’s a cartoonishly evil car salesman…to an irritating extreme.

MO: He describes Jamie Lee Curtis as having “a pair of titties that make you scream for buttermilk and an ass like a ten-year-old boy”.

We’ll let that sink in for a second....

MO: It’s supposed to be nasty, but it took me out of the movie completely. And it’s not the only awful bit in the second act. I lose sympathy for Schwarzenegger as the film goes on. We have to keep in mind that this was made pre-PATRIOT Act, but the way he follows Curtis around is just awful. This premise would have been rejected by audiences on the spot today.

LG: As evidenced by the flop of a very similar film earlier this year This Means War. Movies like True Lies feel very transitional, it was a very different world, it’s post-Cold War, we’re looking for a new boogeyman, and Arab terrorists look like the big ones. But the film doesn’t treat them very seriously. Now to be fair, as ugly and stereotypical as the film’s depiction of Arabs are at times, the film’s main villain does have a legitimate beef with the West…

MO: Yeah, but it’s just thrown out in about a second.

LG: And quickly forgotten thereafter. He throws in one sentence in the middle of a speech, but he’s a psychotic Arab crazy man, so we're supposed to ignore it.

MO: And he’s not a bad actor…

LG: No, he’s good.

MO: And the film isn’t trying to be offensive, but Cameron clearly didn’t take that into consideration. There is a good Arab character on Arnold’s team, but his part is so small it barely registers. In Cameron’s defense, though, he decided not to do his planned sequel to True Lies after September 11, because, in his words, “terrorism isn’t funny anymore”.

LG: There’s also that weird section where Arnold hijacks the generically named spy-organization he works for to follow his wife. It’s easy to understand his anger, but the actions he takes are extremely immature, and he learns very little from it, it doesn’t add to his character…

MO: And the tone is all wrong. It’s supposed to be funny. Oh, and how about the parts where they practically torture Bill Paxton till he pisses his pants (this happens twice).

LG: Torture is hilarious! Well, there is a torture scene late in the film that is funny.

MO: But that’s in the last third of the film when the movie is good again when the action sequences start again. This includes an over-the-top one I like and you don’t involving an uzi falling down the stairs.

LG: It’s done in the most ridiculous way and it’s completely predictable.

MO: It’s done pretty cleverly.

LG: That gag goes a bit far for me. She drops an uzi, it spins in slow motion and shoots everyone but her even though she’s in the range of fire. I can forgive lapses in logic in film, but my brain couldn’t be turned off for it.

MO: That’s fair. Whereas I can overlook some of the questionable racial politics (very barely). You gotta love the balls it takes, even then, to attach a terrorist to a rocket, say “you’re fired”, and shoot him through a building into another helicopter full of terrorists.

LG: Today that image is a little queasy.

MO: Oh, it’s horrifying today.

LG: Put your brain into 1994 mode and you’ll be okay.

MO: Now, we have to talk about the striptease. Why don’t you talk a little bit about it so I can talk about why I hate it.

LG: There’s a scene right before the movie gets good again, Arnold realizes he’s been a terrible husband, and he wants to give his wife the excitement she’s been craving. She still doesn’t know he’s a spy or that he’s aware of her almost-affair with Paxton. He uses government resources to disguise himself, force her into a secret mission where she has to strip for a man in the shadows (really Arnold). It’s a good scene and she’s sexy in it.  the set-up is queasy, and the end is very ugly and creepy, but Jamie Lee Curtis is very funny in that scene.

MO:…she plays it about as well as anyone could. She has that moment during the striptease where she falls, which she really did but she played it off so well that Cameron kept it in. And she’s a very attractive woman, there’s no doubt about that. It’s not that the striptease itself isn’t sexy. Cameron directs it well: his use of shadows in that scene is fantastic. The context around it? Creepy and misogynistic.

LG: Yes.

MO: This kind of scene handled well can be both erotic and frightening, like a David Lynch film can do.

LG: I don’t think you need Lynch…

MO: Ok, but how about Paul Verhoeven, who would have made it so comically over-the-top and overtly satirical that it’d be hilarious.

LG: Over the top? Cameron pushes it pretty far…

MO: But it’s nasty and mean-spirited, like the rest of that section of the movie, and even when the film gets good again it never fully recovers.

LG: I agree with you on the context. But as a scene unto itself, it works.

MO: Maybe by itself, sure, but as part of a whole it doesn’t. It’s absolutely unjustified.

LG: It’s a very interesting shift for Cameron. His films up to this point all have some of the strongest female characters ever put on screen, and then he does this. We can understand Curtis’ actions, but she’s not a very strong woman for the vast majority of the movie.

MO: And it’s not like a fragile but resilient thing like Sarah Connor in the first Terminator.

LG: No, not at all. When she’s put in these male-dominant situations where she has little control, it’s an interesting shift from the lionesses of his previous work.

MO: You have to give this film credit for where it doesn’t go: it’s not a Michael Bay film. The action scenes are great. It’s not jingoistic, it’s not completely dunderheaded in its politics.

LG: It’s never Michael Bay-misogynistic.

MO: The sexism is pretty pervasive, but the women aren’t just guy-accessories, give Cameron that.

LG: Even though it doesn’t work, I think Cameron was trying to make a movie about a relationship that’s in a weird place and try to have the characters move past it. It’s handled badly, and it’s inadvertently sexist, but he’s trying to do something better than that. It's basically something Mr. & Mrs. Smith did much better.

MO: There is potential. Schwarzenegger and Curtis have a Cary Grant-Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest chemistry, but their relationship never quite gets there. At the end when Curtis becomes a spy and they tango, it’s great (all of the dance scenes in this movie are great), but it’s too little too late.

LG: Arnold did all of his own tangos!

MO: And they did most of their own stunts! That part where Arnold rescues Curtis by picking her up and she hangs from a helicopter? That was real.

LG: When the movie is doing action, it’s great. That scene with Arnold chasing the terrorist on a horse is about as ridiculous as it sounds, but it’s goofy fun and works as a spoof of the kind of films Arnold does when working with people other than Cameron and Verhoeven.

MO: It’s a great scene, and a lot of the film is terrific, but that middle section is really a movie-killer.

LG: When I think about the film, I always only remember the good parts and forget the middle. And then I see the film and I go “oh…”. I didn’t mind it the first time around, but the more I watch it, the more dire it is for me. I’m going to have to give the film a B- overall.

MO: I’m giving it a C+. The way I’ve always looked at it, B-/C+ mean essentially the same thing. They’re equally flawed. But B- films narrowly get my recommendation, whereas C+ films don’t quite cut it. I can’t recommend this film. The middle is too dire.

LG: It’s very dire and very irritating in the middle, but the action scenes are mesmerizing for fans of the genre. If you want to learn about action filmmaking, you owe it to yourself to see this.

Max’s Grade: C+

Loren’s Grade: B-

That's it for our discussion of True Lies. If you agree or disagree, feel free to post your comments bellow. You can like this blog on Facebook, and check out Max's blog, The Film Temple for even more awesome movie criticism.

Other Installments in the Cameron Roundtable series:
Xenogenesis 
Piranha II: The Spawning 
The Terminator
Aliens (Special Edition)
Reach
The Abyss (Special Edition)
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
True Lies
Titanic
Avatar (Extended Edition)