Do you want to see a movie this weekend?Here are three reviews by Scott Essman, The Dark Knight, Mongol and WALL-E.After reading the reviews, tell us (on our Buzzbacks below) if you agree or disagree with Scott Essman or if you have any other related thoughts.
By Scott Essman
BATMAN VS. JOKER
Christopher Nolan’s newest installment in Warner Bros. long-running BATMAN franchise is somewhat misleadingly entitled THE DARK KNIGHT.That reference to the 1980s graphic novel editions of Batman by Frank Miller bear little if some significant resemblances to Nolan’s film.In Miller’s Dark Knight, a decrepit 1980s culture was routinely referenced as a middle-aged Batman character confronted the psychosis of the sinister Joker throughout.To actually make Miller’s Dark Knight into a film had the ominous possibilities of living up to the new film’s tag line of “Why So Serious?”
However, living in the reality of 21st century blockbuster filmmaking, Nolan realizes that he must bring some likeability to the proceedings and has a very youthful Christian Bale as his leading man (the actor has been in the business for over 20 years but is just 34) with an even younger though truly menacing Heath Ledger as his counterpoint in his penultimate role – the actor was just shy of 29 when he tragically died earlier this year.
Hunks aside, Nolan has populated his second turn at the Batman revival with genuinely fine actors from the independent film world which originally sprung Nolan himself.Included among them is the splendid Aaron Eckhart, who nearly steals the film from both Bale and Ledger as Harvey Dent who is featured in a subplot with his own origins story.Equally up to the task is indie darling Maggie Gyllenhaal as Bruce Wayne’s ex and current Dent flame Rachel Dawes – a role that belonged to Katie Holmes in Nolan’s first outing, 2005’s BATMAN BEGINS.And then there are reliable old hands Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman who give the movie needed weight among all of the young talent, each playing a personal confidant to Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman.Other roles are nicely cast, such as a mob boss played by an aging but solid Eric Roberts and Michael Jai White (Spawn) as another inner city gang leader.
Where Nolan and his film shine are in the intricacies of character and nuance, especially concerning the fascinating Ledger in his finest performance.While Jack Nicholson’s 1989 Joker was amusingly over-the-top, Ledger’s take on the character is more subtle and understated.Whenever he is onscreen, one cannot help but be glued to his every expression and bit of dialogue.In the annals of great screen villains, Ledger has firmly taken his place among the best of them and is reason alone to recommend the movie.So intriguing are his scenes, you are always left wanting more – more scenes with Ledger, more confrontations between Batman and Joker, and, quite sadly, more films with Ledger in different characterizations that will obviously never come.More than any actor in recent memory, Ledger is foremost among those who died before their time.
In nearly every action scene, and THE DARK KNIGHT has plenty, Nolan presents himself as a more comfortable director than in BATMAN BEGINS where he often shot such scenes so tightly and claustrophobically, they hardly had a chance to breathe.Certainly, THE DARK NIGHT has much less of that problem, though Nolan is on much more sure-footed ground in his stretches with his actors and the dialogue whose creation Nolan shared with his brother Jonathan.Suffice it to say that Nolan’s action moments are often spectacular but fail to resonate beyond eye candy.If in the editing stage, Nolan had all but eliminated Gotham’s chases and explosions and stuck with Ledger and Bale, he still would have come out with a notable film.
Among other good production decisions was the choice to shoot in Chicago, which in superhero cinema has not been covered nearly as much as, say New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.In THE DARK KNIGHT, Chicago becomes a character and is always nicely framed and illustrated to the degree that the Wachowski brothers brilliantly used Sydney, Australia in the MATRIX films..All of this film’s other production touches are top notch and add the needed sheen to a film whose narrative kicks into another gear in the second hour.
Of late, THE DARK KNIGHT has been labeled a masterpiece in some circles, though it is far from it.Yet, in a bloated field of disappointments, it does stand out as one of 2008’s better genre films.Though another Batman film is undoubtedly in the works, perhaps Nolan, with this effort out of his system twice, will return to the type of film with which he made his name and is most assured, such as in the superior independent triumphs of FOLLOWING and MEMENTO.And, just maybe, with new technologies, available world issues, and personal experiences behind him, a more visually iconic director such as Tim Burton can be coaxed back into the fold.
GENGHIS KHAN's MONGOLIA
He was called Temüjin, and after viewing the epic new production MONGOL, now touring art theaters across the US, it will difficult to forget the images of his early life as presented by a team of international filmmakers. Not so much a throwback to an earlier style of moviemaking as an attempt to shed light on why and how the man later known as Genghis Khan rose to power, the film is always beautiful, frequently dramatically interesting, and regularly gripping.
Set at different times throughout Temüjin's life, starting with his boyhood at nine years old at about 1172 and ranging to his mid-period adulthood in the early 1200s, his journey is at once troubling and fascinating. We learn of his place as heir to his father's stature as a khan after a fateful poisoning, his family's abadonment, and his later slow rise to power. We see his own adopted brother sell him into slavery after a dispute and his years in exile before his chosen wife Borte (who he personally selected when he was nine) rescues him.
Surely the filmmakers were more interested in realizing a piece of cinema than a history lesson, and what movie actually serves as pure fact anyway? Expansive vistas, shot in Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia, give unfamiliar viewers an awesome visual spectacle of the nearly barren steppe territory that these nomads traversed. Large scale battle sequences might quote LORD OF THE RINGS, TROY and the NARNIA films, but they are played more realistically and impacting.
All of the choices, from casting to art direction and costume design, combine to thrill and take one away to an otherworldly place centuries ago. If nothing else, this production should pique further interest in the First World to learn more about this character, who to this day in Asia is more legendary than most Western figures. We are told in ending titles that Temüjin had many more adventures after the narrative concludes. Perhaps another telling of his story, chronicling his ultimate conquering of most of Asia, would be an appropriate followup to this sumptuous and triumphant film.
WALL-E, LIKE CLOCKWORK
With unfamiliar predictability, Pixar Studios have delivered over a decade of unprecedented computer-animated hits, churning them out with seamless infallibility with their core group of writers and directors under the overall tutelage of impresario John Lasseter. Audiences have not been as tuned to the brand name Pixar standing as synonymous with a top quality and specific type of upbeat film since the glory days of Pixarʼs parent company, Disney. With film after film, they offer the family audience story-driven entertainments piggybacked on their slick brand of CGI which they have perfected where so many have fallen short.
WALL-E, their latest offering, starts with such promise and atypical social commentary, that, for a time, it has a chance to be the best of the Pixar slate of films, veering into pure science fiction as the filmmakers attempt to observe where Western civilization is heading with current practices dooming both planet earth and its inhabitants. For what seems like half the film, there is nary any dialogue as we follow a little robot who has been left behind to clean up an abandoned earth which has been rendered a virtual dump, mostly at the hands of mega-corporation Big and Large whose waste populates the surface and most of the atmosphere.
Where WALL-E succeeds where other Pixar films have not is in its reliance for wholly visual storytelling, leaving dialogue aside in favor of a macroscopic view of that which remains from the evacuation necessary for the humanoid species to persevere. Ostensibly some 700 years forward, our robot hero goes about his daily chores amid the emptiness of the earth, unaware that he is perhaps the last of his kind. His rituals and amusing habits keep us fully engrossed and ideally could have filled most of the film with a continuation of new ideas.
Of course, the Pixar people have more on their minds than unencumbered sci fi, and they introduce a probe robot character whose mission is to find any signs of foliage and return the evidence to an endlessly orbiting ship some millennia away as a beacon that humans can at last return home. Once the story shifts to the faraway ship and its overstuffed reactive human characters, it loses much steam, but how could it not?
Though the shipʼs erstwhile slovenly captain eventually becomes proactive in a confusing story point which pits the robots against his wishes to immediately return to earth, we have a hard time feeling sympathy for the people and Wall-Eʼs plight to help them. His adventures on the ship cannot help but remain second fiddle to his previous travails on earth. And though we like his female robot companion, we never get over her initial destructiveness and one-dimensionality.
Ultimately, WALL-E does entertain and provides adequately satisfying dramatic narrative for which Pixar is well known. However, we are left with what might have been had we just stayed on earth, or at least, never met those unlikable human beings. Perhaps Pixar will venture into unbridled sci fi one day or perhaps give us a prequel to WALL-E. Either way, they have scored another success, if a somewhat incomplete one.
Postscript: Has anyone else noticed that Wall-E strikingly resembles Number 5 from the Short Circuit movies?
Do you want to see a movie this weekend?
