***This is the third of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
The Conformist might not be Bernardo Bertolucci’s greatest film (it is in no way my favorite), but it fulfills the essence of what the famous director believes: challenge authority, topple the norm, be subversive at all costs. The incestuous, riot-provoking teens of The Dreamers obliged to this mantra, as did Paul and Jeanne in that steamy apartment in Last Tango in Paris. Even to a certain extent did Lucy Harmon, the tattered soul in search of resolution in one of Bertolucci’s tamer films, Stealing Beauty. His films deal with moral corruption at the basest levels, on levels that are so human and so simple that to even question them is in its own right a subversive act. Notice in The Conformist how Marcello, during his confession, argues with the priest so vehemently the priest must stop and correct him — “You are talking to a priest,” the man of the cloth says. Marcello waves it off, as if no priest will hold his beliefs hostage. He talks about his “carnal sin” and a murder and then rails on the priest when he wants to know more about one and less about the other. “You don’t care that I murdered, only that I never went to confession,” he says. I think this scene is evocative of Bertolucci’s style because confession is a rather simple act, but because his characters deal in truth — or just subverting the truth — a simple confession can turn into a hateful rage fueled by a man’s lust for self-worth, which is maybe why Marcello was a cog in a very large Fascist machine. The confessional scene is also very funny to me: all Marcello had to do was complete a confession for his wife, but he makes it this big argument, this massive revelation of his character. It signals his uncompromising position in the film’s landscape.
Every time I see The Conformist it reminds me more and more of three movies. The first one is Jean-Luc-Godard’s Breathless, which was released a decade earlier. More on the other two later. Breathless, the film that sparked the powder keg called French New Wave, was told utilizing a technique I call Abstraction Interaction: it broke the fourth wall, it featured a staccato composition of jump cuts and other camera trickery, and frequently did nothing at all inside its story — yet nothing at all, of course, is very much something. The Conformist, which is also set in Paris like Breathless, rolled forward (literally, too, as Marcello drives to the assassination) on a series of flashbacks, utilizing a hard-to-follow story structure, allowing room for his characters to vent and mull over their lives. Occasionally the film would jump between points with such sharp precision, and to jarring effect, that it would unseat the viewer inside its time loop. Notice the way Marcello gets out of the car at the beginning and begins walking in the mist and fog. The scene cuts quick to the tree-lined street where Marcello, as a young boy, meets the chauffer. Then back to the mist and fog, and finally back again to the boy and his first homosexual experience. Or notice in the scene when Marcello agrees to go to confession that there is an obvious jump cut, or maybe just a continuity error (which is unlikely). One moment he’s leaning against a wall, the next he’s away from it embracing his wife who is happy he has agreed to talk to a priest. Are we seeing a subjective perspective of Marcello’s life? I think we are and Bertolucci utilizes an almost New Wave-like style to hammer it home.
The other two movies it reminds me greatly of are rather strange comparisons to make: The Godfather and Star Wars, both because they share interior space. Bertolucci gave his Conformist interesting rooms to work in. They’re large spacious halls, marble-lined antechambers, padded green rooms and the claustrophobic professor’s homes. With each, though, they have character. That’s what reminds me of The Godfather, with its large offices and meeting rooms with darkened corners. The settings don’t serve the story so much, but they become great because great things are discussed in them. And even though the characters barely interact with furniture, lamps or fixtures in the room, they are memorable and full of character and personality. That’s the way I feel about The Conformist and its various interiors. There’s also another element, the Fascist element to the interior designs and the architecture. This is what reminds me of Star Wars, which had numerous empire sets designed to look cold and evil, fascist to a certain degree. The echoing chambers of the Ministry of the Interior, the colorless Greek-like insane asylum, the large waiting areas where men with falcons and busts criss-cross the halls … these are rooms that bolster the fascist elements of this film. I find humor in the way George Lucas borrowed camera angles and setups from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of Will, a film that chronicled Hitler’s ascent to power at Nuremberg in 1934. Maybe Triumph of the Will, through Star Wars and The Conformist, was the film that told us large, stone rooms with high ceilings and cold surfaces made for fascist imagery.
It’s not just the rooms, though, it’s the way Bertolucci and his cinematographer move through them. Some things are framed slightly askew, or completely crooked, while others are just framed in a very unorthodox manner, using Camera Thirds (divide a frame horizontally and vertically into thirds and then center subjects on the intersections of those lines). Watch the blind party — as large a metaphor you can make without venturing into parody — how the camera hangs above people’s heads, making things almost out of frame completely. Then also watch the scene in the park as Marcello’s assassin comrade walk in the park talking to himself; watch as he sits down and the camera pans so the man is behind a tree. Through all these devices, Bertolucci was showing us the shifty perspective of Marcello’s narrative. As a whole I don’t much care for The Conformist, but the details, like the cinematography and the interiors, have always intrigued me. They’ve also shown how subversive Bertolucci can be with his filming style. He really does provoke us to think outside of what we already know and understand.
The more you think about the new X-Files movie the more your brain begins to swell. Five minutes after it ended I’m almost positive I was suffering an intracranial hematoma, a diagnosis I made from the same place Dr. Scully gets her medical information — Google.
Her non-traditional medical research made me curious how she ever became an FBI agent in the TV series. Yahoo or Wikipedia?
Scully’s search engine of choice aside, what a curious return to the X-Files saga. This new movie doesn’t even feel like an X-File. It feels like some random thriller that floated around Hollywood until someone thought it wise to superimpose agents Mulder and Scully into it.
Maybe “superimpose” is the wrong word. “Transplant” is more appropriate, only because the film goes completely bonkers on the subject. See, if you cut a man’s head off in West Virginia you can sew it back on another body and he’ll live to tap-dance another day. He needs new arms? No problemo, we’ll just pull the old ones off and pop some new ones on. This isn’t an X-File, it’s the design schematic for a Mr. Potato Head.
Former G-Men — because the politically correct G-People sounds stupid — Dana Scully and Fox Mulder have been out of the FBI since the conclusion of the show in 2002. Scully is a doctor at a Catholic hospital, where the priests hold lab results hostage until the Vatican can verify the DEFCON level. Mulder, all beardy and itchy, is hiding out in a place so secret it has a gate and quite possibly a locked doorknob on the front door. “I think the FBI is just glad you’re out of their hair, Fox,” Scully tells her former partner as he clips randomness from newspapers to decipher for alien code.
Scully and Mulder seem to have benefited with the time lapse on their stories; they’re more mature and focused now as wrinkles show on their edges. No word, though, on where they stand romantically. Yeah, they wake up in bed together, but don’t most co-ed FBI teams in the movies?
They’re summoned by a forgiving FBI out to the shady disappearance of an agent in a blanket of fresh West Virginian snow. Actually, the Feds only want Mulder since he’s the expert on the paranormal, but they get both as a package deal — Mulder, the true believer, and Scully, the doubtful skeptic. They’re brought in to interview a convicted pedophile who is somehow psychically connected to the agent’s abduction.
The psychic is a former Catholic priest named Father Joe (Billy Connolly), who wades into a field of snow and without hesitation plucks out a pair of severed arms. Later he cries tears of blood, which would be a pretty cool parlor trick if it didn't look completely satanic. Two field agents (played by Amanda Peet and rapper Xzibit) missed the Pedophile Visions 101 part of their training, thus Mulder is called upon for his expertise, part of which involves asking obvious questions and then listening to the answers.
Mulder is played by David Duchovny, whose face seems more tired and square than his TV version. Gillian Anderson plays Scully, who delivers many wise pieces of advice, but is still unsure of where she stands with Mulder. “I can’t look into the darkness with you anymore,” she tells him as he enters a dorm of sex offenders, definitely not a place to stop and use the bathroom. Later, though, she contradicts herself: “This stubbornness is why I fell in love with you.” Where do Scully and Mulder stand exactly? Only the people who know the show’s episode titles and numbers by heart will truly understand.
Like the show, the movie frequently sides with Scully, the more interesting character if only because she is not sure what to believe in. As if to magnify that theme, she works at the Our Lady of Sorrows Hospital, where she fights a long battle to save a young boy with an untreatable brain condition. The medical dilemma parallels Mulder’s wrangling with Father Joe, who can psychically lead the FBI to various arms caches — and a few head caches, too — but not any living, intact people.
Mulder uncovers a sinister group of Russians who are selling body parts on the open market, or maybe they’re just using them in bizarre Mengele-like experiments. Although the Russians have nothing to do with aliens, Mulder, the ever vigilant UFO advocate, gravitates toward the mysterious disappearance of his kid sister, a thread the show never tied up, a thread X-Files creator Chris Carter is going keep pulling until the absolute last incarnation of the series.
X-Files: I Want to Believe is a mediocre thriller — nothing great, nothing horrible, just middle-of-the-road. Those who worshiped the show will be interested, but even they will question this return after six years. The snowy landscapes are fun, but too much time is spent poking around fields and digging in the ice. And like the show, it asks too many questions that it has no intention on answering. Even the action, of which there’s little of, seems noncommittal.
Overall, it did feel like a more complete story than the first movie (X-Files: Fight the Future, 1998), but because the scope was limited so was the mystery and complexity of the X-Files mythology.
Still, though, I’m not ready to give up on Mulder and Scully, and I hope if they do another film, they actually try to expand some of the threads the series developed instead of just skating around them.
Even with a mess of a story and some oft-repeated jokes, Step Brothers is further proof that the Judd Apatow Comedy Machine, America’s new shining hope for laughs, has no intention of going away with a whimper.
Never mind that Step Brothers can be an uncomfortable experience, one where the main characters are all in desperate need of some clinical evaluation. And not just the step brothers, those two goofballs who are grinning in a classic Sears pose on the movie’s poster; the parents of these nitwits are equally deranged for enabling 40-year-old sons to be middle-aged infants. The whole Freudian affair reminds me of those adult babies in their gigantic diapers and trailer-hitch pacifiers on The Jerry Springer Show. I remember thinking, "Now this is screwed up." But who's worse: the grown men who take dumps in their clothes or their "mommies" who agree to clean it up? Maybe Step Brothers has those answers.
Brennan’s mom has fallen for Dale’s dad and they marry, which means Brennan and Dale now have to share a room as step brothers. They’d have separate rooms but Dale won’t sacrifice his drum space, a room he calls the “beat laboratory.” So there they are: 40-year-old men lounging around in Spider-Man Underoos living like they’re still 11 — “Mom, make me a grilled cheese sandwich!” At one point they make bunk beds by nailing baseball bats and hockey sticks to their bed posts — “It looks exactly like something you’d buy from the store,” one of them says moments before it collapses.
Brennan is played by Will Ferrell, who acts very effeminate and sensitive, and appears almost fragile. Brennan is a momma’s boy to such a degree it’s amazing he has a bellybutton, if you know what I mean. His physical movements are those of a toddler, one of those kids that can walk but hasn’t yet figured out what to do with his arms or how to stand without looking unsure and nervous. Brennan sang once and his singing was so angelic it was compared to “Fergie and Jesus,” but we have reason to doubt this since his mother was doing the comparing.
Dale is played by John C. Reilly, who offers a macho-male contrast to Ferrell’s girlish Brennan. Reilly, whose comedy is as sharp as any comedian’s, proves his worth here yet again in a comedy, and yet again alongside Ferrell after Talladega Nights. That ridiculous face, those beady little eyes, that plump nose, that Huckleberry Hound voice … Reilly was chiseled out of flubber for the comedy world. And he did something very rare: I’ve never appreciated flatulence in the movies, but Reilly might have given me reason to hope.
Neither Brennan or Dale have a drivers license, and when Brennan rides in a car he rides in the back — all that’s missing is a booster seat and sippy cup. And neither have any adult clothes, either — although, each have shirts with howling wolves and unicorns — so when they go looking for jobs they hit the streets on 10-speeds and in borrowed tuxedos, one with tails and the other with a cummerbund. Of course, though, who would hire a 40-year-old who’s never worked, never went to school and comes to a job interview with his step brother in matching tuxedos? Even Wal-Mart — the same company that would promote the Rain Man as its vice president — might object.
The film is as much about the parents as it is the sons, to its detriment, too. Mary Steenburgen (she played Ferrell’s stepmom in Elf) and Richard Jenkins (The Visitor) are accomplished enough actors, but the film really clicks with the bizarre chemistry between Brennan and Dale, not so much their parents. If you’re like me, you’ll want to blame the parents for allowing themselves to raise boys so emotionally troubled. And Jenkins’ father character is given this maniacal urge to sail around the globe, which causes all kinds of problems when Brennan and Dale trash his sailboat in an attempt to film a music video. The video, titled something like "Bitches 'n' Hos," makes no sense to the characters, who up until this point are into rock music, or maybe Barney sing-alongs.
Step Brothers is very funny, supremely funny. It’s the kind of film that makes your stomach hurt from laughing. And yet there are still empty voids with humorless gags. One, for instance, involves the boys sleepwalking and turning the refrigerator inside out. Not only was the scene not funny once, but twice. A Chewbacca mask tops that with three appearances. There’s also a cruel scene with grade schoolers terrorizing grown men into tears that was more creepy than anything else. Finally, there was a sequence where Brennan pulls out a prosthetic nutsack and rubs its sweatiness all over Dale's treasured drums. If I've said it before then I'll say it again: no movie can benefit from a prosthetic nutsack.
My complaints for this movie echo those of director Adam McKay’s other films, Anchorman and Talladega Nights: the comedy can’t sustain the plot its written into. There’s just too much story and not enough energy to get through it all. Brennan and Dale’s dysfunctional relationship is about all Step Brothers can handle, but then it introduces more than that, like the dad's sailboat, Brennan's hot shrink, a brother who may have coined the phrase "mangina" and a helicopter company staffed by people who may have never seen a helicopater before. What this amounts to is a hilarious setup and middle, but then a dud ending.
Regardless, hooray yet again to Judd Apatow (Superbad, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up) and his production company that produced Step Brothers. Even a mediocre Apatow film is better than any Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler or Mike Myers stinker. And as long as that’s the case, then he’s welcome to stick around a lot longer.
***This is the second of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
Stanley Kubrick deals with isolation. He deals with men who have been secluded from society, from their morals, from their own agency. Consider Colonel Dax from Paths of Glory, who’s removed from the decision making of his World War I fighting unit. Or Dave from 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is removed from his command by his ship’s computer, HAL 9000. The list could go on: Private Pyle from Full Metal Jacket, Jack Torrance from The Shining, Dr. Harford in Eyes Wide Shut, the bomber and its crew in Dr. Strangelove … even robotic boy David in Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s interpretation of a Kubrick idea, exhibits this theme of isolation. All of these human and non-human characters are marginalized by the forces near them, scorned by an abnormally cruel world or set of fates. But what makes a Kubrick film so decidedly a Kubrick film is the way in which the characters react to their isolation, the way they process it all together and make informed — and sometimes brash and violent — decisions.
And this is where Alex from A Clockwork Orange steps in. Alex always seemed to me to be a loser hero, a stock character crafted under the film noir genre. Loser heroes tried to make the right choices, but were hopelessly misguided, usually by women, which is how femme fatales were born. Alex was never led astray by women, just his unquenchable urge for self-indulgence (ultra-violence, horror show, “in-out/in-out”). He lived a great but terrible life — great to him, terrible to us — and was betrayed by the Droogies he thought he had tamed. There his isolation begins. And the rest of the movie, he spirals downward by a society eager to punish. It’s ironic that at the end of the movie he’s spiraling back up thanks to the society he so callously abused. I’m reminded of the opening lines of The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” Alex and his malicious batch of Droogies, all nihilists to a moderate degree, had tried to make their environment products of themselves, to Alex’s downfall.
I’ve always been curious with this film why Kubrick would have used the fashion and architectural choices he picked. The clothing was off-the-wall with purple overcoats, the padded jock straps and purple wigs; and the buildings were modular geometric patterns that seemed to confine the characters inside them. The film, in many ways is very dystopian, a sinister and depressing look at a future society. In some ways — for instance, the milk bar, the Durango 95 car, and the elaborate decorations in Alex’s room — the film is as comparable to science fiction as 2001. I felt that Kubrick was trying to place us outside of the norm, away from what we know and fear to give us new things to know and fear, like the ultra-violence of Alex and his misanthropic stooges. Even the primary colors in the opening and closing credits seem foreign and distant, too bright to even be real — then I remember what Alex said about the blood in the films: “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen.” I think Kubrick was involving us on an almost subliminal level. Just as Alex’s videos were brainwashing him, we were being “told” on an almost subconscious level that the world we were watching was somehow more real than our own, and that elements of that world (clothes, architecture, themes) were designed to imprison us inside fortified walls.
In many ways Kubrick was also trying to show us the characters’ glaring inconsistencies. Notice how Dim assists in the rape of a woman in one scene and then speaks with kindness to a mannequin milk dispenser he has named Lucy in the very next. Or notice how Alex views himself in the crucifixion of Christ — dressed in an outfit just as gaudy as his purple record-store robes — as a soldier flailing away on Christ’s back. Yet later in the film, he is the martyr, he is the sacrifice of the immoral Ludovico Technique. So is he a messiah figure or the Messiah’s executioners? The movie would have us believe both, but at different times. Lastly, look at his prison number: “six-double-five-three-two-one” — 655321. It’s almost a perfect sequence in the wrong direction. Was Kubrick playing with us? Was he showing us our descent with Alex in a number that was slightly skewed? I think so.
A Clockwork Orange is a complex movie, a film that can be viewed in too many ways to suggest that any answer is 100 percent correct. It’s my belief that Stanley Kubrick wanted us to interpret the film as we wanted. In some ways I think it does glorify violence to a certain degree. It’s impossible to not enjoy the film’s pacing, the music and that silly dialogue, even as rape and murders are so brazenly and wantonly committed on screen. I also believe that violence is also an adequate anti-violence, and that by showing the scenes he did Kubrick was indicting us right along with Alex; we were his voyeuristic cohorts. By the end of the film, it seems to shoot in all directions, mainly back at the society that allowed such a boy to be created. That, in my opinion, is the ultimate message.
***This is the first of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
No Country For Old Men is an enigma. A conundrum. A paradoxical riddle. In its very nature it is meant to confuse and baffle. Here is a man so evil, so methodically murderous, that even great and wise men — men who have bore witness to evil before — are unable to justify his morals. Sheriff Tom Bell is no stranger to murderers. He says so in his first monologue of the movie, but his justification is skewed into nowhere: “The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He’d have to say, ‘OK, I’ll be part of this world.’” His words, careful and weathered, are trying to assign meaning to someone who has no real purpose to his, or any, existence. Only Anton Chigurh has those answers and by the end of the movie, as he hobbles off undefeated from the wrecked intersection to whatever fate is ahead of him, he seems unlikely to spill his secrets even then.
These are existentialist tenants through and through: the meaning assigned to life and death, to good and evil; the wanton destruction of so many innocent lives for meaningless reasons; the dreams and metaphors that accentuate then cloud this movie’s underlying themes; and that ambiguous scene at the motel with the good Sheriff and the bad Chigurh in an unseen showdown through a broken lock. Absurdism, mankind’s vain attempt to assign meaning to the things around him, is a major element to existentialism and it drives this movie forward. It is why one man can kill, one man can run and one man can throw his hands up in frustration, beaten at his own game. This is a movie about three men's reaction to evil: Chigurh is consumed by it. Llewelyn Moss attempts to defeat it. The Sheriff finds himself at an exasperating stalemate.
When I first saw this movie I credited its complex values to Cormac McCarthy, the author of the book from which the movie is based. The more I see the film, though, I realize that Joel and Ethan Coen are the ultimate architects of its greatness. They have translated McCarthy’s words into a raw, naked film. Watch how little actually happens in No Country For Old Men: large portions are without music or dialogue, the lighting is subtle and natural, camera movements are quiet and steady, and the pacing is agonizingly methodical. If it tried any harder it wouldn’t exist, it would disappear from the screen. By dimming the lights and turning down the volume, though, the Coens have heightened our senses and given us reason to tune in to the details. For instance, watch the way Chigurh searches Moss’ house, the way he takes out the milk and sits on the sofa. He looks into the TV and watches his reflection. Not long after, Sheriff Bell is in the same location, drinking the same milk and watching his own reflection in the same TV — they occupy the same space. They’re reflections in each others' lives and yet they are intrigued by that dark figure in front of them. Is it fear? Maybe for Bell. Another director would have not settled on hints so subtle, but here the Coens speak volumes with barely noticeable frames.
Another delicate scene occurs in our introduction to Moss, who is hunting on a vast, dead plain. As he hunts, a large dark cloud looms over the animals grazing far below him. We can see the cloud’s edges and we can see it creeping toward us. Dark times are coming for Llewelyn Moss. It reminded me a great deal of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, when a random cloud blankets a meadow before the violent death of the film’s stars. Or consider the agonizing twitching and death of the peanut wrapper in the gas station. What a curious sequence for the Coens to put in their film. Any other director would have shown a fifth of it, but there we sit with nearly five countable seconds of wrapper torture. Yes, indeed it’s a metaphor for the floundering, flopping old man at the gas station, who’s so close to death he’ll never appreciate how close it all came to ending. No Country For Old Men exists in the details, in the way it does the little things, even in the little characters — the trailer park manager, chicken hauler, gas station owner, various cab drivers, sheriff’s deputies and hotel clerks.
Notice also the particular attention to clothes. It’s no coincidence that an injured Moss pays some guys for their coat only to later be upstaged by Chigurh, who pays some kids for their silence and a shirt. They also share several scenes with boots: Moss sheds his to hunt and dive into rivers, while Chigurh takes his off to murder and repair wounds. Let's go one more, this time with socks: Moss tells the manager at the clothing store he only wears white socks. Chigurh wears only black socks and we see this in two scenes: the first time occurs when he removes his bloody socks right after he massacres the Mexicans in the hotel room, and the second time after Moss shoots him in the leg and then repairs his wound. The Coens are mixing these characters together because they're are telling us these men are one in the same — equals — just on opposite ends of the spectrum. But only Chigurh’s side is void of feeling and remorse. That is why he can kill so effortlessly. That is why the country is no use for old men.
The Dark Knight passed into film lore the moment Heath Ledger died. We started a posthumous worship of the actor almost immediately, which is a crass and offensive thing Americans do with dearly departed stars nowadays. Dead or not, though, his performance is legendary, the role we’ll measure all other villains by for decades to come — Darth Vader, Bill the Butcher, The Joker.
But don’t judge the movie on Ledger alone; he’s one cog in a very large and very well-lubricated machine that is The Dark Knight, one of this year’s most densely complex films, as much an epic tragedy as it is a comic-book thrill ride. It's also permeated with a sadness that was unexpected, yet imperative to the scope of the story. All of it, though, is masterful filmmaking, the stuff we’ve come to expect from Christopher Nolan.
We begin with Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Gotham’s new district attorney, a bright ray of hope cresting over the city’s madness. In one day alone Dent, square jaw and all, arrests the mob — all of them. So many that the courtroom arraignment is standing-room only, filled with 500 buttonmen, Mafia lieutenants and all the dons in their expensive suits. While Dent mops up in court, Batman stalks the night and cleans up what the police and district attorney can’t touch. Dent and Batman: the White Knight and the Dark Knight.
Batman and billionaire Bruce Wayne are still played by Christian Bale, whose talents seem limitless. Bale seems more athletic here, which may be in part to a new Batman suit that looks like a super-soldier outfit with a cape and ears. Apparently the suit is more flexible, which allows faster hand-to-hand combat, building extractions, cape soaring and gadget deployment. Bruce is more skeptical of authority inside this Batman, but he sees Dent, who is destined to become the bitter Two-Face, as the logical and legal replacement to his caped crusader. At one point he has Alfred, his wise butler (played with subtle perfection by Michael Caine), draw up retirement papers.
With the pressure on the mob, and Dent beaming from City Hall, the city seems to be heading toward better times, and director Nolan shows us as much with daylight scenes and afternoon camera passes of Gotham’s landmarks; for a while the darkness seems to subside.
Enter the Joker, a nutjob with endless resources and invention. With a maniacal sneer and high-pitched giggle, he’s introduced with a magic trick so audacious it’s as mad as he is. Later when he’s arrested, the cops pull dozens of knives from his pockets while he mocks them with fake applause. In a single day, the Joker has stolen all the mobs’ money, so much that the bills stack up into a fort bigger than most single-family homes. The Joker’s proposition to the mob: Let him eliminate Batman and Dent with their blessing and half their money.
Of course, it all gets much more complex, too much to catalog here, but rest assured that every character — including Bruce Wayne’s ex, Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal); Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman); and engineer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) — figures into it. I wouldn’t call the film a mystery, but it uses all these characters to reveal itself to us in intelligent ways and never all at once. Bruce Wayne’s submersion into the darker edges of Batman’s soul are intricate developments that expand as the Joker takes hold. The film never handles it in broad, obvious scenes. They unfold around us, involving us in the processes of Batman’s sacrifices, of Dent’s fateful redemption, of Joker’s elaborate abduction of the hero’s principles. And not everything is solved with a fistfight; some of it is a moral and philosophical battle, like when Joker rigs two boats to explode but gives the passengers the detonators.
Above presenting an action story, a thriller, a suspense and romance (Bruce is still in love with Rachel), Dark Knight also ponders that good-versus-evil dilemma like no other movie has ever attempted. The mythology of the superhero is turned into a bona fide ethos, an authentic philosophy with real values and moral boundaries. It suggests that maybe Batman is not the hero the city needs or wants, and give him a long enough story arc and he’ll be as bad as the Joker. It also plays with the theme of duality, which is personified completely in Two-Face’s grotesque transformation. It’s complicated material and it’s no walk in the park to be sure. It provides an interesting dynamic with the film’s action, which is intense.
There are numerous chases, brawls and show-stopping gunfights, all of them with surprise conclusions and some interesting ethical dilemmas: Can Batman save two people at once? Will a normal person kill to save his own life? Will a good man go bad for the wrong reasons? For once, here’s a movie where the action punctuates the movie’s themes. The action also introduces us to the new Batman vehicle, the Batpod, which is an ejected piece of the Batmobile. It’s essentially a motorcycle with fat racing tires that Batman cruises around town on, cape flapping in the wind, trying to stop each new Joker disaster. Which leads us to …
The Joker. He’s presented as a lovable loon, but also deadly. In one scene he breaks a pool cue in half and tells three men to fight to the death to fill a slot on his team; in another he phones a detonator surgically implanted in a man’s stomach. Ledger avoided Jack Nicholson’s Joker and went with a more isolated, more psychologically deranged character. His origins are never shown — though he tells his victims a variety of stories about his facial scars — yet he’s given an almost poetic edge that seems to come from deep-seated torment. Watch how he hangs his head outside the window of a car as it swerves through Gotham, listen to his whimsical dialogue filled with nuance and rage, witness his destruction of a hospital while dressed in drag … it’s all kind of silly and goofy, but chilling to a level that’s almost uncomfortable.
And because Nolan has developed his characters so expertly, by the time Batman and Joker meet in an interrogation room it's as if two giants were clashing on the screen, like when Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, after all they'd been through in their careers, finally met for coffee in Heat. Batman seethes and growls from behind his suit, Joker smirks and rubs his fingers through his limp, lifeless hair. It's Clash of the Titans, in comic form.
Will Ledger live up to your expectations? That depends, mainly because fans are putting too much pressure on the deceased actor. He’s practically already won an Academy Award from the movie previews alone. I think he’ll be universally cheered, and only partly because he’s passed on, mostly, though, because he is truly terrifying as Batman’s famous nemesis.
Really, though, you can’t begin to understand The Dark Knight by looking at the Joker alone. It’s Joker, it’s Batman, it’s Bruce Wayne and it’s Harvey Dent, who’s Two-Face looks like one of those medical cross sections from encyclopedias. It’s also a pivotal performance by Tiny Lister, who plays a prisoner who makes a decision that shows the renewed strength of Gotham, even as Batman and Dent descend into their fates. The sum of these characters has allowed The Dark Knight to transcend from comic-book movie to dramatic art. Important, character-rich art born from the pulp of DC Comics.
This is a powerful film, one of the best this year. Nolan (The Prestige, Memento) has taken what he did in Batman Begins and filleted it wide open to reveal the darker abysses of Batman’s soul. It’s a natural progression, and it only makes me want to cheer louder for the third and final picture.
Hellboy II: The Golden Army breaks the monotony of the summer movie season. Sure, it’s based on a comic book and we’ve seen enough of those already, but it glows with originality and sparkles with imagination.
It’s one of those rare movies that compel us to dream and wonder. The tone is darker than a dream — it seems to be prying at the very gates of hell — but it is filled with imagery that, when compared to the likes of Hulk and Spider-Man, is downright classic. Above all else, it’s got a lot of heart for its heroes, for the women they love and even for the villains, who are never given fair shakes in these superhero movies.
Credit goes to two people: director Guillermo del Toro (soon to be directing The Hobbit), a man who is clearly earning every letter in his title of visionary, and Ron Perlman, a forgotten actor who plays the title character with a charismatic snarl and sad, lonely eyes. Perlman, whose main source of income the last decade has been voicing video game characters, has one ardent fan who’s never given up on him — that fan: del Toro. The two of them work magic together.
To review, Hellboy is some sort of red devil ripped from another universe by a well-meaning scientist who then adopts the powerful creature as his son. Red, as his friends call him, could be Lucifer's stepson for all we know: he has large horns on his dome that he files down with a power sander, a forked tail that must make for uncomfortable sitting positions, and an oversized mitten of rock that serves as his right hand. He looks as evil as any fantasy baddie, but he’s a big softy who adores kittens and warm, pillowy pancakes. The scientist, who has since died, enlists Red as a government agent to battle the forces of evil. All this is information from the first Hellboy, the energetic first chapter in what is shaping up to be a trilogy of films.
We pick up with Hellboy as he still battles supernatural forces for a secret government program with initials I can’t remember, nor care to mention. The big guy lives with his new girlfriend, Liz (Selma Blair), whose mood is manifested through flames that sometimes explode from her body, a cool party trick if it didn’t internally combust guests. They live down the hall from Abe Sapien, a fish-like man with gills who reads T.S. Eliot and Faulkner while sober, but garbles Barry Manilow lyrics with a little Mexican beer in his fish belly. They are led by a human played by Jeffrey Tambor, who plays Jeffrey Tambor but with more exasperation (surprisingly this is possible), and also Johann Krauss (voiced by Family Guy creator Seth McFarlane), a man made of ectoplasmic smoke who is contained in a large diving outfit.
I’ve described five characters and it only scratches the surface on this visual marvel of a film. Characters of all different sizes, shapes and with varying numbers of heads make all kinds of strange appearances in Hellboy’s bizarre world. One villain looks like a large walrus and he has a metal fist on a chain that can shoot from his forearm. The fist, apparently with a mind of its own, then spider walks back to to its home to be cocked into place inside the creature’s arm. There are also little round-headed mantis creatures that devour men’s teeth by way of the abdomen. The creature feature gets especially interesting as it snakes into a secret underground trading market and dozens of other beings make small cameo-like appearances, including a man with an entire city growing from his head and a brute with a sweet-voiced infant growing from his stomach. “You have a cute baby, sir,” Red tells the beast. The baby responds: “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor.” The scene has already been compared, by del Toro himself no less, to the Mos Eisley Cantina scene from Star Wars; it’s completely accurate.
Hellboy II does a curious thing with its villains: it gives them humanity and compassion. When a giant tree grows from under the Brooklyn Bridge (Betty Smith would be proud) and begins tossing cars at Red and his crew, there’s a moment where the camera lingers on the tree’s demise just long enough that you feel bad for it. And watch what happens to its body when life leaves it — everyone, even the person who killed it, admires the beauty that it spills. The main villain is the devious Prince Nuada, who’s actions are wrong, but maybe not his intentions. By the end of the film, we’re questioning whether or not his outcome was warranted or not. I liked this element of the film; it was interesting that del Toro would play with our expectations of the characters. He also hinted that maybe Red, whose hand unlocks the Apocalypse, is in for a rough ride in his next outing.
I’ve yet to mention the plot: it involves Prince Nuada’s quest to turn on the Golden Army, a military force of 4,900 robotic super soldiers made of wind-up parts, intricate gears and tiny locomotives. Red has to sort this all out, amid his own personal dilemmas with Liz, before the army goes online and attacks the human race. Perlman lets his Hellboy, whose face is carved from red granite, handle it in strides, trading bravado with stupid-funny comedy moments — Perlman is the perfect choice for this deviant superhero.
Hellboy spends much of the sequel shooting and crushing things, which is not to say it's at all like last month's tantrum-throwing Incredible Hulk. While the big green guy growled two-syllable sentences ("Hulk smash!") this big red guy faces the world with a certain skepticism but also a vocabulary that has progressed past pre-school. He's a strong and capable fighter, but he wins fights purely to be more stubborn than his opponent. This is something he prides himself on, which is maybe why his new roomie, Liz, can't seem to let their troubled relationship congeal past the obvious problems ("You look like Satan. I sweat magma."). And Red never does the dishes, which even in superhero households can cause an argument. We're introduced to their relationship just following one of Liz's fiery outbursts, after which Red plops on their bed and lifts up the sheets so a dozen scorched cats can vacate from their hiding spot. "Is it the cats?" asks Red, locked in a domestic give-and-take. The film gives them a plausible romance and then gives us ample room to fill in the blanks, like how she could become pregnant with Hellboy's spawn. I'd love to see that Sears portrait.
Visually, this is one of the most spectacular movies of the year, filled with enough “oh wow” moments to keep you muttering through the entire picture. Every sequence contains some kind of visual treat: be it the opening titles of hammering white-hot gears, an impressive storytelling sequence with wooden puppets, a giant gatekeeper made of stone, Red’s destruction of the army, the automatic regeneration of the army or, in a scene reminiscent of del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, a nightmarish creature with eyes everywhere but where eyes are supposed to be. Much of the film is CGI, but its computer effects are done so well that they mesh completely with the physical stunts and Perlman's large prosthetic physique. In every medium, in every format, Hellboy II is too inventive for its own good.
I loved this movie. And I know specifically why: it was designed, from the bottom up, to be visually mesmerizing. And, frame by frame, it is.
***This is the third of five in-depth essays on great directors.***
The Conformist might not be Bernardo Bertolucci’s greatest film (it is in no way my favorite), but it fulfills the essence of what the famous director believes: challenge authority, topple the norm, be subversive at all costs. The incestuous, riot-provoking teens of The Dreamers obliged to this mantra, as did Paul and Jeanne in that steamy apartment in Last Tango in Paris. Even to a certain extent did Lucy Harmon, the tattered soul in search of resolution in one of Bertolucci’s tamer films, Stealing Beauty. His films deal with moral corruption at the basest levels, on levels that are so human and so simple that to even question them is in its own right a subversive act. Notice in The Conformist how Marcello, during his confession, argues with the priest so vehemently the priest must stop and correct him — “You are talking to a priest,” the man of the cloth says. Marcello waves it off, as if no priest will hold his beliefs hostage. He talks about his “carnal sin” and a murder and then rails on the priest when he wants to know more about one and less about the other. “You don’t care that I murdered, only that I never went to confession,” he says. I think this scene is evocative of Bertolucci’s style because confession is a rather simple act, but because his characters deal in truth — or just subverting the truth — a simple confession can turn into a hateful rage fueled by a man’s lust for self-worth, which is maybe why Marcello was a cog in a very large Fascist machine. The confessional scene is also very funny to me: all Marcello had to do was complete a confession for his wife, but he makes it this big argument, this massive revelation of his character. It signals his uncompromising position in the film’s landscape.
Every time I see The Conformist it reminds me more and more of three movies. The first one is Jean-Luc-Godard’s Breathless, which was released a decade earlier. More on the other two later. Breathless, the film that sparked the powder keg called French New Wave, was told utilizing a technique I call Abstraction Interaction: it broke the fourth wall, it featured a staccato composition of jump cuts and other camera trickery, and frequently did nothing at all inside its story — yet nothing at all, of course, is very much something. The Conformist, which is also set in Paris like Breathless, rolled forward (literally, too, as Marcello drives to the assassination) on a series of flashbacks, utilizing a hard-to-follow story structure, allowing room for his characters to vent and mull over their lives. Occasionally the film would jump between points with such sharp precision, and to jarring effect, that it would unseat the viewer inside its time loop. Notice the way Marcello gets out of the car at the beginning and begins walking in the mist and fog. The scene cuts quick to the tree-lined street where Marcello, as a young boy, meets the chauffer. Then back to the mist and fog, and finally back again to the boy and his first homosexual experience. Or notice in the scene when Marcello agrees to go to confession that there is an obvious jump cut, or maybe just a continuity error (which is unlikely). One moment he’s leaning against a wall, the next he’s away from it embracing his wife who is happy he has agreed to talk to a priest. Are we seeing a subjective perspective of Marcello’s life? I think we are and Bertolucci utilizes an almost New Wave-like style to hammer it home.
The other two movies it reminds me greatly of are rather strange comparisons to make: The Godfather and Star Wars, both because they share interior space. Bertolucci gave his Conformist interesting rooms to work in. They’re large spacious halls, marble-lined antechambers, padded green rooms and the claustrophobic professor’s homes. With each, though, they have character. That’s what reminds me of The Godfather, with its large offices and meeting rooms with darkened corners. The settings don’t serve the story so much, but they become great because great things are discussed in them. And even though the characters barely interact with furniture, lamps or fixtures in the room, they are memorable and full of character and personality. That’s the way I feel about The Conformist and its various interiors. There’s also another element, the Fascist element to the interior designs and the architecture. This is what reminds me of Star Wars, which had numerous empire sets designed to look cold and evil, fascist to a certain degree. The echoing chambers of the Ministry of the Interior, the colorless Greek-like insane asylum, the large waiting areas where men with falcons and busts criss-cross the halls … these are rooms that bolster the fascist elements of this film. I find humor in the way George Lucas borrowed camera angles and setups from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of Will, a film that chronicled Hitler’s ascent to power at Nuremberg in 1934. Maybe Triumph of the Will, through Star Wars and The Conformist, was the film that told us large, stone rooms with high ceilings and cold surfaces made for fascist imagery.
It’s not just the rooms, though, it’s the way Bertolucci and his cinematographer move through them. Some things are framed slightly askew, or completely crooked, while others are just framed in a very unorthodox manner, using Camera Thirds (divide a frame horizontally and vertically into thirds and then center subjects on the intersections of those lines). Watch the blind party — as large a metaphor you can make without venturing into parody — how the camera hangs above people’s heads, making things almost out of frame completely. Then also watch the scene in the park as Marcello’s assassin comrade walk in the park talking to himself; watch as he sits down and the camera pans so the man is behind a tree. Through all these devices, Bertolucci was showing us the shifty perspective of Marcello’s narrative. As a whole I don’t much care for The Conformist, but the details, like the cinematography and the interiors, have always intrigued me. They’ve also shown how subversive Bertolucci can be with his filming style. He really does provoke us to think outside of what we already know and understand.
