Northern summer busts the block
Movies seen winter 2008.
Originally written: August 2008
The Dark Knight
Leatherheads
Hancock
Get Smart
Kung Fu Panda
Six Degrees of Separation
The northern summer film season has increasingly become the domain of the blockbuster. With schools and universities having vacations, the weeks between May and (US) Labor Day are the time for film distributors to bring out the offerings aimed at rhe youth market - and that nowadays generally means the big-budget sfx movie. What's been really interesting in recent years is how those media companies with experience in one area of the media have become increasingly willing to move vertically into others. News Corp was one of the first of these: leveraging its newspaper experience first into television (with the launch of what's now regarded as the fourth US network, Fox) and Disney soon followed. The most recent movers have been the comic (in the US read "comic book") companies - who saw the motza generated by film adaptations of their properties and decided that they were made to be selling the rights for a lump sum when they could be garnering the big profits by themselves being the producers. This has had mixed results, as such entrepreneurial adventures are wont to have. Marvel has had a few successes and a couple of near misses. DC Comics is the latest into the gates and the returns from its Batman movies look like making it a very successful move. When you manage to produce a movie that the critics love and the fans adore, it is unsurprising that the US domestic box office returns are startling. While The Dark Knight has started out with a bang - $US200 million within the first week and $US300 in 10 days - the ability of the film to keep attracting return business will determine just how mega-successful it will be. The early evidence is that fans have seen it several times in the first 10 days. The films previously to take ultra-large returns internationally have been light rather than dark. I suspect that the Batman thriller will go the distance despite the tone of the movie.
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The Joker is wild
The over-arching tone of the new Christopher Nolan movie, The Dark Knight, is noir, as it must be when the seriously joy-challenged Batman confronts the clearly deranged Joker. The centrality of the super-villain to the film is interesting. Rarely has such a nihilist character been brought into sharper focus by the mainstream cinema. (Ironically the most recent film to feature such a character was Nolan's Batman Begins, so you'd have thought that the Batman would be better prepared for a villain devoted to annihilation and chaos than others might be or than he indicates in the recent film.) And that parenthetical comment might be the only real criticism that I can make about the film. The Dark Knight is close to the perfect superhero movie and one with surprising depth. Following his analysis of the genesis of the Batman, Nolan this time has the conflicted hero seriously doubting the efficacy of his mission. He yearns for the love of Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal's portrayal is much more perceptive than Katie Holmes' and you better understand Bruce Wayne's desires) and for a more normal life. The emergence of a 'white knight' in the form of new DA Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), who seems capable of successfully confronting the various criminal mobs of Gotham, provides Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale again makes both aspects of his character interesting for the viewer) with a rationale to dispense the cowl and cape and lead a more normal life. Not only is Dent the white light complementing Batman's darker shade, he is also Wayne's rival for the love of Rachel Dawes. This level of plot complexity is unexpected, not just in this genre, but in any mainstream studio film. These developments play out against a background wherein the police and public are debating whether the Batman is a malign or benign influence. His actions - transcending national borders and the need for court-sanctioned police raids - allow the DA and the police to lay their hands on the mob's money-launderer, which allows Dent to initiate court action to take the crims down. Unfortunately for the good citizens of Gotham, neither the dark knight nor the white knight is quite ready for the Keyser Sose of deranged criminals. The way that Nolan has envisaged the Joker is something quite new, and Heath Ledger's portrayal of him is startling. This is light years away from Caesar Romero's camp clown or Jack Nicholson's cracked, but essentially criminally motivated, version. Ledger's Joker has reasons for his actions but they are not those easily understood by others (or by himself). He is constantly explaining his origins, but each explanation is different. He seems to be concerned, like other super-villains, with the acquisition of wealth, but that is not his motivation at all. He is prepared to expend the lives of others with qualm: the opening bank robbery where one by one his henchmen are eliminated is indicative of the madness of his methods. When he confronts the power-brokers of Gotham, he is a ruthless man of will prepared to confront his nemeses with unpalatable and impossible choices. The climactic scenario in which he plants bombs on two ferries, each carrying very different groups of passengers, is a masterpiece of sadistic imagination from a mind that considers only the worst in humanity - a view that must reflect his own thoughts. Both the mobsters and the authorities find it impossible to comprehend someone so deranged and dangerous. Only the Batman, aided by some insights form Alfred, has any idea. If The Dark Knight is sui generis in its matching of the darker elements of a noir psychological thriller with the superstructure of a superhero plot, it is more conventional in its employment of the elements of modern movie-making that dominate the summer blockbuster. Like Iron Man, the film must, for all its plot and character development, eventually provide its audience with a satisfying display of sfx mastery. This it does in spades, with a number of action scenes. These include explosions, disasters, a couple of extraordinary chases, and especially the confrontations in an uncompleted skyscraper. The audience gets its money's worth and the games people have the basis for their next product, but these scenes add to and supplement the more serious aspects of the film, without derogating from them, and that is Nolan's achievement. Certainly he is aided by some extraordinary performances: Bale, Eckhart, Gyllenhall and, especially, Ledger are outstanding; Michael Caine, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman return to add some gravitas. But Nolan's script (co-written with his brother Jonathan) and direction hold it all together. After Memento, Insomnia, The Prestige and Batman Begins, he continues to hit new heights. His films show insight and unexpected depth, and transcend the genres in which they might be placed. He is a true original and gives hope for more original and insightful film-making. The Dark Knight is not directly related to Frank Miller's classic graphic novel series, but it takes some of its thematic elements from the black imagery that Miller brought back to the Batman. This is brilliant film-making that deserves every cent that it makes.
George makes the play
George Clooney is no Christopher Nolan but he shows promise. It is rare for a lead actor to cross over into the ranks of major directors but, in the footsteps of Eastwood, Beatty and Redford, his third movie as director indicates that he is heading that way. Unlike Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, Leatherheads is primarily a comedy. Like his two earlier films, it is essentially an historical and biographical piece. While his first two movies drew on the early history of television for their essentially 'true' stories (Confessions relied on the unreliable memoirs of Chuck Barris), this movie confects a fictional tale based around the transition, in the 1920s, of professional (American) football from a sideshow to a serious sport. The script is derivative of the sort of film common the late 1930s, a sort of sports screwball comedy. Clooney, who had but bit parts in his first two directed films, here takes the lead, an aging footballer seeking to prolong his career before he has to join the real world. He recruits a war hero college star (John Krasinski) to his team on the promise of extraordinary payments and leverages his presence to draw increasingly large crowds and some serious press attention. On such attender is Lexie (Renee Zellwegger) the sort of hotshot female reporter that Ros Russell pioneered in His Girl Friday and Jennifer Jason Leigh lampooned in The Hudsucker Proxy. Predictably a love triangle develops and, equally predictably, the rivalry between the young Carter and the older "Dodge" is played out on and off the field. The one element that doesn't quite work is that Krasinski is not quite strong enough to match Clooney and Zellwegger, who are much more in their element. The leads are complemented by a strong cast, including a couple of Coen Brother regulars, Stephen Root, here providing some comic relief as a sozzled journalist, and Wayne Duvall as the coach, as well as Jack Thompson, effective as Lexie's editor. Clooney's direction is assured. The weakness here is in the lightness of the script, which doesn't provide quite enough meat. Nonetheless, the Dodge and Lexie characters are fun and the film has enough comedy, and enough football action, to keep the audience interested. If only it had done as good a job as Bull Durham did for minor league baseball in explaining some of the peculiar jargon, particularly related to the cant applying the plays from an earlier, less regulated, era of professional sport.
Where there's a Will ...
This summer film-makers are having some fun with the superhero genre. Certainly there have been some bog ordinary fare, as the latest version of The Hulk appears to be, but the surprisingly profound The Dark Knight and the sardonic Iron Man, as well as Guillermo del Toro's take on Hellboy, what looks like an action-oriented adaptation of Wanted and the promise of a Wolveroine spin-off, indicate that we should not expect the usual. In that sense Peter Berg's Hancock is as unexpected as could be imagined. The film world has been overdue for the slob superhero and Will Smith's Hancock, with alcohol and anger management issues, as well as a general disregard for the collateral damage done in the effecting of his superheroic feats, personifies the comedic potential of the genre. Hancock appears to be the only one of his kind, and he can't remember anything before 1931, when he woke up in a Florida hospital with no memory of who (or what) he was. He now works the superhero beat in LA, a city that is less than gruntled with his activities. It is at this point that he saves PR man Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) from a fatal impact with a train. Ray wants to return the favor by helping rehabilitate Hancock, and his solution is for the superhero to cop a plea on some destruction of property charges and do some county time. Ray's wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), is not as sympathetic to the hero as her hubby. As Ray predicts, Hancock's incarceration leads to a crime wave and the police are forced to seek Hancock's aid, particularly when criminal mastermind Red (Eddie Marsan) criminally masterminds a bank heist that turns into a siege. (The prison scenes also have one of the funniest sight gags ever to emerge fom a superhero movie.) The reformed and sober Hancock, now clad in the more usual lycra tights, rather than the dirty T-shirt and beanie, is soon getting kudos rather than raspberries from the public. It is at this point that the movie makes an unpredictable, but startling, u-turn and we learn more of the background to Hancock and to the motivations of some of the other characters. More predictable is that there is also a prison break orchestrated by Red and by others who have suffered at Hancock's hands, leading to the sort of sfx confrontation that is required towards the climax of any superhero genre movie. After all, if they are going to spend the money, and attract the teen audience (as well as set up the computer game), they need a few such scenes, with their attendant violence, to keep the punters sweet. The film flows well, thanks to Berg's sure hand with the direction. There are good performances from the three leads, particularly Smith and Theron. What doesn't quite work as well is the sudden change in tone that is effected halfway through the movie, transforming it from a largely humorous piece to something a little different. Nonetheless, this is a good, entertaining diversion.
Would you believe ... OK?
Get Smart was among the smartest comedy series in television history. In the 1960s, when brain-dead fodder like Hogan's Heroes and The Beverley Hillbillies were far more common, the spy spoof series, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, provided some extremely silly situations but some very intelligent satire of contemporary espionage fact and fiction. There was an attempt to use many of the original actors in an ironically self-descriptive full-length movie called The Nude Bomb. Now, as seems inevitable for all television shows of the 1960s and 1970s, someone has re-imagined the concept in a feature film. The result, surprisingly enough, is not so shabby. The hardest thing (apart from ensuring that the writers brought the funny) was to cast the main role. Don Adams had personified Maxwell Smart, who was largely based on the character that Adams had first developed on The Bill Dana Show. The thing about Max was that he was stupid, but that he had no clue that this was the case. Steve Carell does this sort of part very well, deadpanning in much the same way that Adams used to. In an interesting twist, the writers have made Max a supremely competent analyst who wants to become a field agent in the super-secret CONTROL spy agency. This allows Max to solve the puzzle while still being the butt of the film's pratfall comedy. The details of the plot are largely unimportant, they serve only to provide a framework for the action, which is a good mixture of mindless slapstick, super-smart satire and well-staged action scenes. Naturally enough there is a Chief (Alan Arkin is very good, as always as Max's harassed superior), continually frustrated by Max's antics; Siegfried (Terence Stamp), putting together yet another dastardly KAOS plot; an assortment of CONTROL and KAOS agents, and double agents; and the beautiful 99 (Anne Hathaway) who, like her television analog is the only truly intelligent and competent person in the story. Hathaway, about whom I have not always been complementary, is very good in this role, pretty much stealing every scene she is in. The jokes work most of the time and the action scenes are terrific. It is not the half-hour televisions series, which had nary a wasted moment in any of its inspired madness, and it does occasionally feel stretched over 90 minutes. Nonetheless, it's good slick entertainment and it manages to effectively bring Max and co into the twenty-first century.
A refusal to panda
As martial arts movies become more cartoony, with even Jackie Chan eschewing stunts that he can do himself without the use of sfx or cgi, it's natural that animators would think about making a cartoon which deals with martial arts. In this case it is Dreamworks who are responsible for a movie they have called Kung Fu Panda, and as you would expect, they don't take it all that seriously. The film is built around a kung fu temple run by Oogway, wherein a red panda Shifu is the teacher and his five students (the "furious five") are the imaginatively named Tigress, Mantis, Viper, Crane and Monkey. One of the is fated to be the Dragon Warrior, primed to face a former student turned bad, Tai Lung, a snow leopard currently incarcerated in a prison from which escape is impossible. In the event, the title character, Po, a fat, lazy, assistant in his father's noodle shop who can barely climb the stairs from his village to the temple, is chosen as the Dragon Warrior and it falls to Shifu to train the untrainable. Meanwhile Tai Lung stages a prison break and the furious five are unable to defeat him. Naturally that means that the leopard and the panda must face off - with an inevitable result. The script is imaginative enough, with the writers finding a myriad of paths to humor, albeit fairly bland humor. The voice characterisations are also good, including Jack Black as Po, Dustin Hoffman as Shifu and Ian McShane (Tai Lung). The animation is, as is most contemporary computer-generated art, flawless. There's enough here to intrigue adults while entertaining kids but, apart from a brilliant sequence involving a battle for the last dumpling, there's nothing original or truly interesting about the film.
From our DVD collection - reviews of good and great movies not previously reviewed
Six Degrees of Separation is obviously a filmed version of a stage play, where the action has been opened out somewhat but still has that constricted feel of the theatre. As its title suggests, it is based on the conceit that there is an interconnectedness of humanity, that we can trace relationships through these concatenations to the extent that any two humans can be connected through a maximum of six links. Set among the upper East Side rich of New York, the story starts when Flan and Ouisa Kittredge (Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing) are entertaining a South African friend (Ian McKellen) from whom they want money to forward an art deal. Into their home stumbles Paul (Will Smith), a young black man who claims to be a friend of their children and who has been mugged. Paul entertains them, cooks for them and reveals that he is Sidney Poitier's son. He stays the night and in the morning the Kittredges discover him entertaining a naked hustler. He flees. Over the ensuing days, as they relate this story to their friends, they discover that Paul has been pulling this scam with a number of the parents of their children's friends. They try the cops, to no avail, and seek to talk through why Paul behaves as he does, and why they are happy to fall for his lies. There's a lot of talking in this Fred Schepisi directed film. Much of it is revealing of character. But the outstanding element of the film is the acting. Paul is one of Will Smith's early roles and he is very charismatic. His entry into the sterile lives of the art set sets off reverberations that impact on most of them. Stockard Channing created Ouisa on stage and her familiarity with the character is clear. She lets us understand Ouisa's gradual realisation of the emptiness of the lives she and her friends spend and how Paul's activities have brought this into stark relief. On the other hand, Sutherland's Flan is far less phlegmatic. He is satisfied with the narrow confines of his life and outraged that anyone might disturb them. It is one of Sutherland's finer performances. They are ably supported by McKellen, Richard Masur, Mary Beth Hurt and Bruce Davidson. One of the more intelligent and insightful dramas of recent times.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).]