Film Reviews 2 comments

Countdown to Inception, Part VI: The Dark Knight

By Andrew on July 14th, 2010

The Dark Knight

Ever the critical darling thanks to films like Memento and the successful Batman relaunch, it was arguably The Dark Knight that solidified Nolan’s reputation as a commercial darling too. With the release of Inception just two short days away, it would seem as if Nolan has attained the status of a legendary director whose name alone can draw in the crowds and praise the same way that names like Pixar and Spielberg do. But does the billion dollar grossing The Dark Knight deserve every accolade and every dollar? While a strong technical film despite being a cut below what Nolan is capable of producing, The Dark Knight may stand as Nolan’s least engaging movie yet.

To speak briefly of my personal preferences, I’m the sort of person who likes their superheroes to be charismatic, confident, and assured. I do enjoy Batman, especially Nolan’s take on the character, but when Iron Man and Tony Stark quite literally came out of nowhere and blew me away a short two months before The Dark Knight did, Batman ended up playing second fiddle. All things considered, The Dark Knight is undoubtedly the superior film. But with Bruce Wayne’s brooding melancholy and mopey resignation to the playboy billionaire lifestyle versus Tony Stark’scharming receptiveness to fun while still being grounded in a situation’s gravity, I see Iron Man as the superior character.

I can’t say that I cared much for the “bat growl”…

Although to be fair, The Dark Knight was hardly about Batman and Bruce Wayne, anyway. With the character’s somewhat loopy backstory traced in the previous film, its already been assumed that he’s become a resolute agent of justice and a symbol of fear in the criminal underworld. This time, the man of the hour is The Joker, whose portrayal by the late Heath Ledger, from the opening heist sequence to the skyscraper finale, was nothing short of perfect. For all the cops and robbers plot-point weaving, the focus of the film is never diverted from characterising the Joker as an anarchic agent of chaos for very long.

For me, however, the film’s greatest improvement over Batman Begins is the its portrayal of Gotham City. Gone are the comically filthy litter strewn streets, miscalculated island slums, and all hints of a glorious (but nevertheless absurd) monorail system. Gotham City has been cleaned up and more closely resembles the traditional view of a contemporary American metropolis. Key to the success of the cinematic Batman adaptations is the treatment of its characters and environments as legitimate and plausible. Except for all the gadgetry that would make even James Bond jealous, everything feels real. I even applaud Nolan for widening the scope of the film to include situations which both depict and impact Gotham’s common inhabitants since it more effectively creates the impression of a city on the brink of anarchy and destruction.

Although I did think that the bat-cycle was pretty cool.

But too many indulgences and liberties have been taken with The Dark Knight, and it’s hard not to feel that the entire project was blown far too out of proportion for its own good. Clocking in at two and a half hours, Nolan is asking a lot of his audiences. And even though the film is, for the most part, immaculately well executed, The Dark Knight is too high strung over too long a period of time that it becomes exhausting. Take the transformation of Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) into Two Face, for example, which occurs rather suddenly after a point where most normal films would be wrapping up. Frankly, The Dark Knight’s ending is one less of satisfaction and more of running out of momentum.

Too much has been woven into The Dark Knight that, even if enjoyed on the perfectly functional level of visceral popcorn entertainment, it feels too dense and ambitious for its own good. A lot has been written about how The Dark Knight reached a new tier of comic book adaptation maturity, and with filmmaking this good, I can’t disagree. Narrative-wise, however, its overstretched and overzealous, and has bitten off more than it can chew.

Film Reviews 1 comment

Countdown to Inception, Part V: The Prestige

By Andrew on July 13th, 2010

The Prestige

Few movies are capable of diving audiences quite like The Prestige, the sort of movie with no startling defects except for a single miscalculation egregious enough to ruin everything. While beautifully staged and executed with all the theatricality and deception one might expect from a story of feuding magicians, Nolan overestimated just how flexible and receptive we’re willing to be with regards to how things wrap up. What this means is that any review of The Prestige, even be it a short cursory one like this, must journey into spoiler territory to examine why it is either good or bad. Truth be told, It’s the last ten minutes that either make or break The Prestige. The first 110 minutes, wonderful and gorgeous though they may be, end up accounting for so very little when held up against the bizarre place the ending chooses to go.
.
In turn of the century London, two magicians, once former colleagues, begin a bitter rivalry after one (Hugh Jackman) holds the other (Christian Bale) responsible for the death of his beloved during a botched water tank trick. As they each build their own separate shows in pursuit of audience adulation, they scheme behind the scenes to undermine, sabotage, and ruin each other. So thorough and meticulous are their plans for vengeance that even their cryptic diaries acknowledge the seeming inevitability that they will one day be stolen and cracked, and include passages that mock the other for reaching yet another dead end.
.

Magicians and scientists have more in common than you might think.

As Angier (Jackman’s character) finds success after his tragedy rather easily, Borden (Bale’s character) struggles in parlour venues before developing a signature illusion, The Transported Man, which drives Angier to obsession as he tries to discover its secret. This leads him to Nikola Tesla (David Bowie), who builds for him a terrifying electric device that reinvents and outshines Borden’s trick, and resigns Borden to the same fanatical obsession that nearly drove Angier insane.

After the fairly linear Batman Begins and equally straightforward study of Insomnia, Nolan seems to have had the financial confidence to return to the sort of involved and sophisticated film on which he cut his teeth, albeit with a far more illustrious cast and crew. So like Following and Memento which begin at the end and recapitulate events, The Prestige traces a similar outline. It twists and turns through seemingly endless deceptions, buoyed by the charisma of Hugh Jackman, gravity of Michael Caine, and goddess-like appeal of Scarlett Johansson. No character is particularly deep, except for Borden due to the film’s focus on his plight to get back on his feet, but most performances are exceptional.

Sadly, The Prestige very nearly throws it all away. A film, like many other things, is only as strong as its weakest link. And the Prestige’s weakest link is the final sequence of events where all is finally revealed, with an explanation so incompatible with the movie that came before that it very much feels like the jokey alternate ending you’d expect from the Blu-Ray release. Continue reading only if you’ve seen the movie, or if you have no intention of seeing it and don’t mind a brief, casual, spoiler-filled discussion.

Regarding the ending… (spoilers ahead)

Film Reviews 1 comment

Countdown to Inception, Part IV: Batman Begins

By Andrew on July 12th, 2010

Batman Begins

Eight years after Schumacher’s “bat nipple” debacle, a reboot of the Batman character seemed well due. And as had been the case with Spider-Man and X-Men, a more acclaimed and educated director than usual was selected to handle the reinvention. Nolan threw out the garish nonsense that left audience’s of the previous two Batman movies bitter, and looked to tell a sane and sober origin story. Nothing wrong with this in theory, since Batman is a super wealthy construction and not a super natural one. But when the film’s cornerstone is an ancient clan of mountain ninjas who destroy decadent decaying cities, it must be said that something has gone amiss.
.
To the film’s credit, the laughable synopsis is handled well enough that you only realize how insane the proceedings were when summarizing it for a friend. After being robbed of the vengeance of his parents’ murder, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) disappears for seven years to learn how to battle crime and injustice effectively, and generally to understand the criminal mind. This leads him to the League of Shadows, an academy of skilled stealth warriors who monitor the balance of justice in world-class cities, and intervene forcefully where necessary. With the League of Shadows setting its sights on Gotham City, which is being torn apart by the rampant criminal underworld of Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), Wayne abandons his new colleagues and aims to save Gotham city from destruction.
.
.
But the ninjas and the mob aren’t the only adversaries in this origin story. Batman also has to deal with the fate of his multi-billion dollar empire, the scepticism of the police department, and a mad psychiatrist (Cillian  Murphy) who’s constantly undermining the authority of the courts, and by extension Wayne’s childhood friend and love interest, Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes). If you’re looking to find where bloated superhero movies started, Batman Begins isn’t a bad place to consider first. There’s so much going on that it can become exhausting to keep track of all the threads being interwoven. Some ends don’t even work all that effectively. Take the requisite romantic angle, for example. When Bruce and Rachel kiss in the closing scene, the feeling is less of contentment and more of, “Oh, that’s right. I forgot about this obligation because the film did so little to set it up.” It’s no wonder that hardly anyone remembers Katie Holmes’ involvement.

Not everything about Batman Begins works as well as it could have, largely due to the disparity of its components. This is especially reflected in Gotham City itself, which takes on unique quirks based on the central villain at the moment. The isolated slums floating on an island in the middle of the city just seemed terribly contrived, giving Gotham the feel of a melange rather than a rational place. A minor complaint, to be sure, but if the intention was an authentic portrayal of a rotting metropolis, then it’s of paramount importance that the city feels genuine. Gotham simply doesn’t.

As for the action, well let’s be polite and say that the area is far from Nolan’s forte. Batman’s many brawls lack rhythm and coherence, and the effect of the theatricality is lost with the lack of focus. It’s the drama between the characters which keeps the momentum up. In fact there’s a fairly good short crime/vigilante feature if you strip away the ancillary comic book malarkey. Batman works as a superhero because he’s a well to do person with too much time and far too much money on his hands. Efforts to drench it in juvenile trappings are not only diminishing, but very likely damaging.

Film Reviews 3 comments

Countdown to Inception, Part III: Insomnia

By Andrew on July 11th, 2010

Insomnia

After two features which made a habit of distorting time and perception, Nolan’s third outing is a decidedly more straightforward affair. Except for flashing glimpses of past events, there is no sequential warping or colour coded chronology. Instead, Insomnia unfolds like most any other hollywood crime thriller, telling the tale of a pair of LA homicide detectives as they are called up to Alaska to lend a hand in a murder investigation.

Under investigation for forensic fraudulence, detectives Dormer (Al Pacino) and Eckhart (Martin Donovan) escape the Internal Affairs heat in their LA department for the calm of a small Alaskan town. A community perpetually lit by daylight in the summer months, which has been recently shaken by the murder of a seventeen year old girl. With the pressures facing him back home about to escalate due to his partner’s confessed intended betrayal, a rather straightforward murder investigation becomes rather taxing on Dormer, with the endless Alaskan daylight depriving him of sleep doing little to make affairs any easier. After a botched attempt to ensnare the killer (Robin Williams) on a foggy beach leaves Eckhart dead by Dormer’s gun, the sleep deprived Dormer is left wondering whether or not he meant to kill his partner between the calls from the killer, who saw the accident, trying to exploit his fortuitous turn of events.
.

Much like in Following and Memento, the question of who’s guilty of doing what is never really an issue. We see the character’s actions clearly, and no attempt is made to present the scenarios as anything other than what they really are. Where the ambiguities of Following and Memento arose from sequential manipulation, Insomnia’s ambiguities are strictly ones of character, giving the film a stronger moral foothold than anything Following’s and Memento’s distortion could ever attain. So if Following resonates on an emotional level, and Memento on an intellectual one, then Insomnia completes the trifecta with its ethical focus. The ironically named Dormer (derived from the Latin verb for sleep) faces a rather Machiavellian dilemma as he debates whether or not its right to let one killer go to keep thirty years worth of murderers locked up, or to pursue the present murderer at the risk of having his sterling career and bright future irrevocably undermined.

Lacking the directorial panache that permeated his first two features, Nolan keeps Insomnia relatively straight and trusts his actors to do what’s expected of them. As the sleepless days tick by, Al Pacino’s Dormer wonderfully executes the ongoing unfastening of his character’s hinges. Subtle gestures that could be easily lost, like the fumbling for a coffee mug or the slipping of fingers around a doorknob, make Dormer’s affliction affecting, while the wallpaper sears and the blinding lights hiss in his desperation to keep the sunlight out of his hotel room. The other leads don’t get this kind of attention, however, so Hilary Swank’s rookie cop and Martin Donovan’s disloyal detective tend to fall by Alaska’s rocky wayside. Even Robin Williams, nailing the meticulous phrasing and menace of a memorable movie murderer, loses considerable charm when the teasing voice on Dormer’s hotel line needs a boring body to go along with it.

More about a tense and involving narrative quandary than showing off film school flair, Insomnia may feel more organic and natural than Nolan’s previous features, but its core isn’t so mysterious and involving as to warrant the same level of commitment. For anyone else, this would be a great crime thriller to have in their filmography. But as a followup to Memento, it feels just a tad bloated and a little vacant.

Film Reviews 1 comment

Countdown to Inception, Part II: Memento

By Andrew on July 10th, 2010

Memento

By and large, it must be said that Memento isn’t terribly demanding on an intellectual level. While it indeed wrestles with weighty themes of identity, reality, and perception, there’s also more approachable angles of grief and revenge onto which an audience can more easily latch. Not that the cinematic pop-philosophising is at all too far for an audience to reach, since some occasionally forced voice-overs attempt to speak the thousands of words which Nolan doesn’t always trust in Guy Pearce’s actions to transmit. As open-ended as the masterful arrangement of scenes is, nothing is really left to interpretation on the intellectual level. Leonard becomes a fully realized character, and every question posed is answered. Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with such tidiness, but it wouldn’t hurt to let the audience walk away with a personal quandary or two.

Still, if you find yourself unable to engage Memento on that level of comprehension, there’s always the equally well executed emotional level to enjoy as Leonard hunts down his wife’s killer. Guy Pearce’s Leonard is amicably well mannered, despite (or perhaps because of) the increasing distance between the present and his final memory, while Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano (both from The Matrix released the previous year) take turns competing for Leonard’s trust as they try to use him for their own nebulous ends. There are no other major characters from a face time perspective outside of this triangle, yet there are plenty of central secondary ones, including a middle-aged couple Leonard frequently recalls, a bound and beaten man named Dodd discovered in one of Leonard’s motel rooms, and flashbacks to the lingering traces of Leonard’s wife.

If I had a Jaguar, $200,000.00USD, and a suit this good, I’d probably ditch the whole revenge thing and head to Vegas… provided I could remember.

While there are indeed talented portrayals across the board (certainly an upgrade from the entirely serviceable yet nevertheless unremarkable spectrum of Following), what Memento will almost certainly most be remembered for is its ingenious assembly. From the very first minute with the un-developing Polaroid snapshot, a very meticulous narrative structure is being built. Black and white sequences in chronological order alternate with colour sequences in reverse, so despite ostensibly beginning at the end, the more pressing question remains how we got there. It may sound initially complicated, but it becomes easy to appreciate and to grasp as colour sequences begin and end on distinct beats that connect easily while the black and white remains a largely coherent stream of consciousness. It’s certainly less chaotic than Following, that’s for sure, but the payoff is still lessened since it can feel a bit too clinical and calculated at times.

Memento mostly strikes me as the sort of film that pretentious art students dream of producing if they weren’t limited by their own paltry means. Coming from a person like me, this isn’t exactly a compliment as I mostly see fine art student products as weird and non-nconformed for its own sake and not for a particular ideal. Nolan is an exception because he uses his talents to create products of mass consumption and not just personal monuments. So while Memento is at times blisteringly pretentious, it’s still a statement that we are capable of enjoying, regardless of personal competence.