The Dark Knight

This movie is easily 40 minutes (the equivalent of one villain) too long, has some awful dialogue, pretensions to ethical "complexity," and a cluttered supporting cast. These are problems, but they are all problems of ambition--of trying to make a *real* movie, and not a cartoon. I don't necessarily applaud that ambition, because it seems misplaced and at times pretentious, but the resulting flaws are at least forgivable on that account.

What is that ambition, exactly? Weirdly, it seems to be to tell a story about a *city*--where most movies today are blandly "topical." This gives Gotham much more time and attention than one would expect for what is usually a faceless Chicago/New York hybrid--touching on city politics, geography, the way personal lives run into our jobs when we don't live in the suburbs and compartmentalize these things, media spectacles, etc. It doesn't have a lot to say about these things, but they are there, along with the dominant motif that the film links with the urban setting: hope and faith in our public servants. This theme produces the over-long Harvey Dent/Two-face plot, which is a kind of tumor clinging to the much-more-interesting Joker plot, but the film clearly feels it welded these together more than it really did. Two-face is supposed to be the "ultimate" mechanism in the Joker's plan for destabilizing Gotham: throwing the city into chaos, and exposing the noble and normal for the frauds they are. But that summary is much more succinct than anything you'll get in the movie.

Batman/Bruce Wayne (the chiseled and unreadable Christian Bale) gets less screen time than his deformed, villainous counterparts--proving the tired cliche that villains are more interesting than heroes--but if I can turn this cliche on its head, isn't the point of Batman that he has this interesting dark side? So actually that truism explains nothing, because of all superheroes, Batman is the closest to being a villain--a point taken up IN CONTENT by the film's plot, but not at all IN FORM (i.e. it is still much more interested in the "real" bad guys).

Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart are really great here-- Oldman disappears into the role, while Eckhart perfects the way charming and charismatic (blond) people can really annoy you. I wasn't very moved or sympathetic with Dent's tragedy...for whatever reasons... Maggie Gyllenhaal did nothing for me... Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman seem like one too many old actors for basically the same role... Again, the film obviously thinks it has some real drama here, but for the most part it doesn't. Why does Hollywood think that *we* will care as much about these characters as the director does?

The centerpiece of the film is a long car chase through the underground thoroughfares of Gotham--when most of the threads of the plot are drawn into the outcome of this one sequence: it's completely riveting. The other contender for best scene is when the Joker blows up a hospital---there's an incredible long take that is uncannily real-looking and disturbing; it's not shot like an "action film" at all. And that is the film's greatest strength--when it succeeds at being "not just a comic book movie" it is really astonishing; but because these (for the most part) aren't geniuses at work here, some really great shots and situations sit amid a lot of bloated could-have-been material.

Wall*E

This is one of the more critically-acclaimed movies of the year, and it is easy to see why. The animation is beautiful, the main character is very likable, the message is eco-friendly, it's short and sweet, and the publicity campaign advertises its pedigree as something like Chaplin/Keaton meets Toy Story.

The plot is not so very different from the General, but the movie goes wrong wrong wrong by trying to stir up our sympathy for humans. That is, it's as though in the General, our sympathy had to be on both sides of the Civil War at once. We like Wall*E, and we our engaged in his pursuit of love, but the movie hits a series of false notes when we are asked to side with the humans (fat, stupid) over the robots (full of personality, quirky, sensitive).

This is a story of redemption; *our* redemption, by the actions of those who understand and love us better than we love or know ourselves. Wall*E is a FAN of humanity, where we have become alienated from it. So far, so good. But the mistake is the "evil computer" plot imported here from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In other words, the ACTION does not take up the central conflict or theme (redemption) at all. For an example of action that does take up the central conflict of a work, we need look no farther than 2001: the theme of evolution and the fate of humanity's development is played out IN THE PLOT, viz., will the computer be the "next step" in mental life, or the giant space baby? This is an existential question, but also the question of the success or failure of the mission. Wall*E is all over the map in thematic/sympathetic terms, and so all the action involving humans is more central than it ought to have been.

That is my only real complaint, but it's a big one. In frank terms: the plot should have been something else.

Goyokin (1969)

I don't know anything verifiable about this topic, but my take on Samurai films is as follows:
1) the genre needs to be taken in a strict sense; viz., action films where the plot turns on sword-fighting
2) thus, not Rashomon, but certainly The Hidden Fortress.
3) I'm in no position to draw a timeline here, but the early films we have to associate with the genre tend to star Toshiro Mifune (Seven Samurai, the Samurai Trilogy, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Chushingura, Yojimbo, Sanjuro).
4) so, what *looks like* a "classic" period would be 1954-1962
5) afterwards, one has the highly critical samurai films: Samurai Rebellion, Harakiri, etc. in which loyalty and the samurai code are shown as deeply flawed.
6) By the end of the 1960s, this genre appears to have died out, and the notable 1970s Samurai films are the trashy and mega-violent Lone Wolf and Cub films (which are wonderful but have nothing to do with the earlier era).

Goyokin is truly a film at the end of its genre's possibilities. Big, expensive-looking, shot in color, and overlong, the film is truly "decadent" in every sense. The plot is VERY straight-forward, the character development is... not there, and the end is *about* the genre's inability-to-continue (historically, the point where samurais face their demise). In this sense, it is analogous to the later John Wayne films (The Shootist) or the Wild Bunch.

There are some beautiful shots, and the final battle is a real highlight, topped only by the weird refusal-to-end that takes up the last 10 minutes. But there are no interesting situations to remember, and the movie's strategy is akin to that of Napoleon's 1813 battles: bulk relying on what has worked before, but lazily and to little effect.

Get Smart

Two poorly-reviewed, big, dumb comedies opened this weekend, in direct competition with each other--evidently something of a rarity in the summer blockbuster season. Get Smart has taken the box office prize over The Love Guru, Mike Meyers' new project. Undoubtedly Get Smart is the better movie. But, having seen it last night, I can't help wishing I had seen the abysmally-received Love Guru instead, just to see how bad it was. Get Smart is predictably mediocre, but The Love Guru has something of the unfathomable about it. And so picking the "better" movie to see now looks like the wrong choice.

Get Smart doesn't need a lot of reviewing, so I'll just lay out the basics:

Unlike most comedies of this sort, the good jokes don't start to fall until the middle third of the movie. This is strange, because the first third is the stuff of the TV series, which should be reliably funny. Instead, the movie finds humor where it can get it, which happens to be in an extended and pointless James Bond-like crashing-an-eastern-european's-swanky-party-while-searching-his-house-for-secret-plans scene. Those are always the best part of the Bond movies, so it works here for Get Smart's first laughs. The first half-hour is weirdly unfunny, given that it is basically office politics, something Carrell is superb at.

The final third of the movie, though, is simply unrewarding. Do I care if the President (James Caan) blows up? No. Am I surprised at the identity of the double agent or in Max's and 99's budding relationship? No. And yet all these explosions and near-death escapes are thrown at me as though I do. It's all very tiresome. The naive thing to say would be, "It just turns into a regular action movie." But I LIKE regular action movies, y'know?

Carrell, Alan Arkin, and Terence Stamp are all fantastic here, while Anne Hathaway ought to have filed an injunction against the film being released. She is wooden. It is hard for me to believe this will not single-handedly destroy her career. The Rock, as usual, wears thin after about 4 minutes.

Most of all, the movie seems rushed and incoherent. In the opening credits, we see that Max's life is a mess: his milk is curdled, his goldfish is dead, etc. But, wait--in fact, he seems to be the most organized, driven, and reliable person in the fucking world. It seems the movie doesn't understand its own protagonist.

Get Smart comes out of the box already-dated and out of touch. But not, as one might expect, because its 1960s TV reference no longer sticks---rather, because it seems so very late 1990s. You know, when Mike Meyers was making those other movies.

R.I.P. Sidney Pollack

It's true, Sidney Pollack did not direct a great number of "great" films--perhaps none. And, in my movie-watching lifetime, he only directed two high-profile movies, The Firm and Sabrina.

What is much more important for me is that Sidney Pollack was one of THE great character actors. Who doesn't recall the turn-off-your-cell-phones clip that played before movies last year? ("We don't interrupt your phone calls--don't interrupt our movies"; with Pollack "directing" someone's break-up phone call)--it was a dumb idea, but one thing was very clear: Sidney Pollack plays a terrifying, self-assured asshole like no one else.

A lot of this was Pollack's voice and physical presence: everything Burt Lancaster was going for in The Sweet Smell of Success, but without the gay (under?)tones. While usually bespectacled and obviously "civilized," Pollack could switch into "threatening" with utter believability.

I even remember his character's name in Michael Clayton, an utterly forgettable film: Marty Bach! Of course! Who else could have played Marty Bach?

The same is true of his character in Eyes Wide Shut---well, really it's the same character. Your older friend, whom you trusted, who fucked you over, and is now expecting you to hold his shit.

Pollack is really truly great in the 1992 Woody Allen movie Husbands and Wives, especially one scene where it is entirely possible that he is going to murder Liam Neeson. The entire movie would fall apart if anyone else had had to play this role. One instantly recalls a scene where Pollack drags his new girlfriend across a driveway to his car. "He could kill her," you are thinking every second of the way. It's something Woody Allen's films normally stumble over, but Pollack was a genius casting decision (in his first starring role) that makes the whole movie work.

So, not an extensive filmography, and not an illustrious one. But like a great fielder on an otherwise mediocre baseball team, Pollack's acting raised the level of everything he was part of. Will we remember Out of Africa? Probably not. But Pollack's acting in the films of *other* directors (Kubrick, Allen) will always be worth another viewing. Mr. Pollack, we will miss you.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

First off, let's imagine what a GOOD sequel to this franchise, made in 2008, might have looked like. Yeah? Pretty difficult. In the era of Tomb Raider, the Da Vinci Code, National Treasure, and the Mummy, making a movie in this genre *at all* seems like a dubious proposition.

Oh but wait, the man who brought us The Phantom Menace wrote the story? And a 66-year-old man will star? Now we're cooking.

But let me come at this another way. At some point in the movie, 5 or so people are in a boat on the Amazon, which is about to hurtle over several towering waterfalls. "Oh no!"--you are supposed to think. But I thought, "Who *are* these people?" It's hard in this movie to 1) remember if a character was in the earlier films (Karen Allen) 2) is a new, annoying addition meant to seem like he is from the universe of the earlier films (Ray Winstone, John Hurt, Jim Broadbent [the dean]) or 3) an entirely new character meant to draw in specific audiences (Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett). So, when I should be worrying about whether they are going to survive this waterfall-jump (ripped off from the Fugitive, let's be honest), instead I am thinking--"maybe these characters are from the Temple of Doom movie," which I've not seen.

So the film has what wikipedia would call "Extended Universe" issues. The largest of these is the plot device itself, which was made into a theme-park ride during the decade of development on the script. The crystal skull is bound to annoy and disappoint everyone. The theater audience I saw this movie with were a real bunch of dolts, but I think a more sophisticated crowd might find certain skull-related scenes risible.

Basically, if you know what the word "risible" means, you might have a chance to use it describing this film.

Are there people-eating ants? Yes. Is Shia LaBeouf less annoying than we suspsected? Yes. Have we not always wanted to drive a motorcycle through an Ivy League library? Yes.

On the other hand, Cate Blanchett's much-touted role might have been played just as well by virtually anyone, the movie is about 15 (specific) minutes too long, some scenes are a bit "Sky Captain"-ish, and it ends badly.

The main question you are asking is, does it COUNT as an Indiana Jones movie? Or is it like the Velvet Underground album without Lou Reed? The crappy part is, yeah, it counts. It looks (about) right, that famous score is there, Harrison Ford is good, people with accents continue to be evil, and you kind of get into a lot of the scenes. But that's about all. To put it in my terms, you stop hating on Harrison Ford's pants as a 2008-abomination about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the movie is Spielberg's to lose.

Star Wars (1977)

Viktor Shklovsky, a Russian Formalist literary critic, held that the purpose of art was to "enstrange" us from the language of everyday life, to turn the familiar and automatic into something unrecognizable and startling or weird.

But what about when the startlingly weird has become so familiar that we approach it with utter familiarity, unflinchingly?

This is the case with the Star Wars films. The first film has two oddities in its title, "Episode IV" and the subtitle "A New Hope." When the film opens, and the scrolling introduction shows that we are already on the fourth episode--well, if anyone ever asks for a good example of what I take pretentiousness to be, it is this "Episode IV" business. And isn't the film just called "Star Wars"? Not until The Phantom Menace ruined the convenience of saying, "the first one," did it become necessary to ever *say* "A New Hope."

The confusing introduction is succeeded by ~20 minutes of one robot talking to himself--in space, in the desert--before we meet our hero, the ridiculously-named and badly-acted Luke Skywalker. At this point, the film settles into a fairy tale/adventure plot that is easy to follow: his family is murdered, he runs off to join the rebellion and take revenge, meets strange and exciting new people, is captured, escapes, loses his mentor, but wins the day in the big battle. A lot of ground is covered very quickly and not always coherently. Nonetheless, once Alec Guinness shows up, the movie is in good hands, and Harrison Ford brings some much-needed coolness to the nerdiness of the first half.

Compare this film with the near-contemporaneous Alien. While Star Wars is not "really" a sci-fi movie, but is obviously in the Arthurian tradition (what else could explain the light sabers?), Alien is also not really a sci-fi movie, but is truly a horror movie. Both movies have long, slow build-ups that I can imagine would tax most viewers' patience nowadays, but Star Wars chooses to spend this time with a lot of awkward explanatory dialogue, while Alien just sets mood. In Alien, the viewer initially does not know that there *are* aliens (title notwithstanding)--we are terrified when they pop up, just as the crew is. In Star Wars, ever oddity is weirdly taken for granted: nothing in this universe is weird FOR the characters.

The lesson here is, viewed "as though for the first time," Star Wars is clunky and weird. The Empire Strikes Back is the superior movie because it dispenses with much of the exposition and just advances several plot lines simultaneously (like Die Walküre as compared to Das Rheingold). On the other hand, Star Wars is made to be watched over and over--it is a film for nerds who want to know everything about this imaginary universe. There is no need for mood or even coherence. Alien is a well-made film. But I will never want to "go deeper" into its world.

The logic seems to be that something happens in the film because "that's what happens next in Star Wars." This is maddening from a technical perspective, but it is ideally made for fans (The Good the Bad and the Ugly is like this, too). Star Wars has surprisingly little action, only a dozen or so speaking parts, and truly awful dialogue. Long stretches are without charm. But like the Bible, King Arthur, the Song of Roland, or anything else you know the story of by heart, every part of the movie turns out to be perfectly situated and masterfully-ordered. Not because it couldn't have been done better or tighter, but because for all the weirdness of the organization, I want the same thing that is in my memory up on screen again: that's "how it goes."