..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

The Dark Knight
with Space Chimps, Mamma Mia!, and
Encounters At The End Of The World
Plus Quick Hits On This Week's DVDs

THE DARK KNIGHT (Four stars)
U.S.; Christopher Nolan (Warner Bros)

The new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, is being touted in some circles as a visionary epic or a bat-masterpiece. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is fun to watch.
    
In fact, as long as we’re living in an age where the biggest-movie budget loot tends to be sunk into adaptations of “Batman,” “Superman,“ “Spider-Man” and “The Incredible Hulk,” rather than, say “War and Peace,” “Remembrance of Things Past,” “Henderson the Rain King“ or “V,” this is the kind of movie we probably should be happy enough to get: fast, hip, expensively mounted, beautifully crafted and hell on wheels to look at. I had a good time (twice) at The Dark Knight, which hits its targets on style and story. Director-co-writer Christopher Nolan and his visual wizards ingeniously turn Chicago into a film noir bat-cave inferno, the Gotham City of your best bad dreams. The script is smart and the movie has three deeper-than-usual antagonists, all very well played: stalwart bat-hero Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale), crazed psycho-killer The Joker (Heath Ledger) and tormented hero/villain Harvey Dent a.k.a. Two-Face (Aaron Eckhart).
    
All these guys come out of the Bob Kane-created comic -- and so does wry butler Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), dogged Lieutenant/Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), and others. Nolan takes these simple, archetypal characters and plunges them deep into a psychological horror story. He pumps up the action, juices up the story, and lights a fire under his actors. Whether encased in those armor-like bat clothes, or draped in polyester Joker-suits (The Joker’s style is a mixture of Gucci and grunge), they respond, as does most of the rest of the cast, with sometimes harrowing intensity.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, makes heroine/law-woman Rachel Dawes-- beloved of Bruce yet stolen by straight arrow Harvey -- pretty far from the usual comic book sex fantasy; she’s more like a feminist TV commentator and BWOC. Her tragic B.F. Harvey, the district attorney with the half-ruined face, is a man torn between good and evil, stretched on the rack of the film‘s Manichean morality. The Joker is the ultimate anarchist, a clown trying to tear the world apart, spitting off wisecracks as if to an audience of evil-minded cabaret drunks. As for Batman himself, he‘s the tortured, orphaned child of privilege, possessed of enormous (inherited) wealth, bent on revenge against the bad -- but not reckoning on the way heroes obsessed with villains can take on the traits of their prey.

SCENE SPOILERS

The movie begins with close to its best scene: an ingeniously choreographed bank robbery, full of whiplash acting and wicked jokes (there’s a priceless visual punch line one moment when a school bus crashes through the bank wall), staged by the Joker‘s clownface-masked minions, a “Reservoir Dumbos” style gang who keep killing each other as the plot races along, until only one (guess who) is left. It’s a chillingly funny scene, though I kept wondering afterward how the Joker could recruit replacement gang members once word gets around.

END SPOILERS

The Dark Knight is full of brilliantly staged action set-pieces -- though they never top that one -- and they’re made even more brilliant by the movie‘s use of IMAX cameras and huge screen technology. We get furious bat cycle/car chases, tense ferry-bomb standoffs, and lots of action up among the skyscrapers, given in scary detail and depth. All of this leads to a bitter, tortured climax whose secrets we’ll keep. Suffice it to say that Nolan, who made a modern neo-noir classic with the reverse-amnesia thriller Memento, is still making noirs and that Kane’s “Batman” saga, which started off thriving on noir and German expressionist silent movies, is ideal material for him.

Kane‘s Batman comic art got much of its look and feel from movies like German émigré Paul Leni‘s The Cat and the Canary and The Joker himself was modeled on Conrad Veidt’s carved smiley-face disfigured hero in Leni‘s film of Victor Hugo‘s The Man Who Laughs. Ledger makes a very different laugher than Veidt, the tall, slender movie fiend who played the deadly somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and the evil and lordly Major Strasser in Casablanca. Ledger is hip and feline and bitterly funny, and, in some ways, like Jack Nicholson’s Joker for Tim Burton, he‘s the real hero of this movie.

Batman, any Batman, is sometimes too uptight, too pretty and too damned rich to really empathize with. We probably respond more to his father figures, Caine’s Alfred and Morgan Freeman’s Wayne Enterprises CEO ---- Fox. Ledger’s Joker -- whose look was partly inspired by punk rockers Johnny Rotten and Iggy Pop -- is someone whom the audience can get slightly more conformable with. He has the original Joker’s clown-white face and perpetual red-lipped, rip-faced grin, as well as his purple and green outfit. But it’s a revisionist Joker look that suggests Calvin Klein ads and Euro-chic. He’s Bruce’s id, exploding. Ledger plays the part as if he knows he’s got the move stolen from his first scene on, and wants to go further, twist up and scramble the audience reactions, making us share his mean vision of things. He mutters to the audience (or himself) the way comedians like W. C. Fields and Groucho used to -- and he serves a similar subversive function.

Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey has been given a perfect comic book look, split-in-half, he has a schizophrenic face. Just as Batman, like Zorro, has no face, the fop who runs into a masked avenger. There’s a joke in our reactions to this: For many in the audience (especially political conservatives) Bruce Wayne is more their ideal fantasy figure than the Bat-Guy. He’s the playboy “hero” of money and hedonism they want to be, while Batman is stuck with this weird suit and moral albatross - a law and order liberal, obsessed with helping people-- with a conscience they/d rather shuck off or “outgrow.”

That’s why Batman was one comic book superhero who definitely captured the imagination of the eternal 12-year-olds who loved him, and who still, in some ways, make up a lot of the audience for The Dark Knight. He was a creature of the night who was really a force for good, a caped crime-buster who was also a twisted Christ symbol. The comic stories always established a menace, then hurled Batman (and later Robin) at them. The movie does the same. But this time, it’s the menace that we dig most -- not just because of Ledger’s early death, or his earlier bravery in taking on Brokeback Mountain and another Gyllenhaal, but because he creates a true nightmare being, someone comfortable with chaos.

You can tell there was a lot of money well-spent on The Dark Knight and it’s even stimulating when the movie finishes on a dark or melancholy note -- though of course the series-side precedent for that is The Empire Strikes Back. But I don’t think it make sense to praise this movie in terms we’d reserve for the movies we can’t get (enough) in this system. It’s a hellacious action nightmare thriller, a noir for our time.

And Ledger’s swan song brings down the house. That’s more than enough.
 

 

SPACE CHIMPS (One and a half stars)
U.S.; Kirk De Micco (20th Century Fox)

Space Chimps -- an animated feature about cute little simian cosmonauts in space -- has at least one virtue. It makes the other upcoming funny-animals/insects-in-space movie, Fly Me to the Moon, look good by comparison. Kids may appreciate this movie on some level, but adults who wander in, may feel that they’ve fallen into feature cartoon hell.

They‘re they‘ll be assaulted by the outer space adventures and antics of Ham III (voiced by SNL and Lonely Island‘s Andy Samberg), an arrogant “star” who does a carnival chimp-cannonball act exploiting the memory of his famous astronaut chimp-grandpa, Ham -- and who is picked as one of three primates set to be shot through a space wormhole to recover or locate a lost space probe.

It’s a “do or die” expedition. A venal fool of a Senator (who seems to wield more power than a Presidential fool) wants to shut down NASA’s space program and turn it into an arts-and-crafts fest. Ham III -- who seems to have forgotten that this space shot will make him a superstar -- pooh-poohs the program and his “team-mates”: fetching Luna (Cheryl Hines) and uptight military guy Titan (Patrick Warburton), until all of them head to the distant planet, where the U.S. probe has been commandeered by mad tyrant Zartog (Jeff Daniels) and where their allies include adorable little twinkle-alien Kilowatt (Kristin Chenoweth).

Early on, Luna reacts to Ham III by calling him “kinda funny, in an unbelievably annoying way.“ That might also describe the movie -- though even “kinda funny“ is pushing it. Not even the 2001 parody cheered me up. The script, by Kirk De Micco (Quest for Camelot) and Robert Moreland (Happily N‘Ever After) has lines like “chimp off the old block,” “chimpathize,” and other chimp-cracks that keep chimping away at our patience. The direction (by De Micco) drags it down further; the voice performances are coy and smart-alecky. Space Chimps, which is recommended only for actual chimpanzees, starts off badly and gets worse. Most of it is just chimp change.

MAMMA MIA! (Two and a half stars)
U.S.; Phyllida Lloyd (Universal)

I wasn’t an Abba fan in their 1974-82 heyday, when they were one of the world’s biggest pop groups -- though as someone with two Swedish-American grandparents, I might have had a little national pride, as I do for Ingmar and Ingrid Bergman and Victor Sjostrom. But they sound good now. And Mamma Mia!, a movie musical composed of their song hits -- all originally written by Abba members Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (and non-member Stig Anderson) and sung at the time by those two, accompanied by their Abba wives, Agneta Feltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad -- makes ideal use of that easy-going, irresistible music.

This ridiculously entertaining movie is adapted from the hit stage play by the same director and writer: Phyllida Lord and Catherine Johnson. And the ultra-catchy songs are strung around a fragile, amusingly absurd story about a wedding on a Greek island, involving Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), the gorgeous daughter of independent single woman and island resort owner Donna (Meryl Streep). Unbeknownst to her mother, the young bride invites all three of the men (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard) who were Donna’s lovers and may be her father, in order to find daddy Right. (Neither mom nor dad really know.) Three is the magic number here: Mom has two friends (Christine Baranski and Julie Walters) and so does the daughter -- and all of them, and the three guys, get heavily involved in the musical action.
There’s something delightful about the way the Abba songs summon up all the corny, cock-eyed romanticism that the story kiddingly whips up. The result, full of sunlight, rhythm, dancing and torch songs, didn’t remind me that much of one of the old MGM classics -- with their wit and finesse. But it did recall the 20th Century Fox musicals, with their pizzazz, high spirits, gaiety and occasional craziness.

Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche wouldn’t have been out of place here -- and neither are Streep, Brosnan, Skarsgard, Baranski and the others. Mamma Mia! has a powerhouse cast, though not necessarily for a musical. But when these dramatic actors start throwing themselves into it and selling these songs, it’s entertaining in a crazy way that plants an almost constant silly smile opn your face. Streep, who sang well as the country-western star in Robert Altman’s swan song, Prairie Home Companion and who’s really game, shamelessly belts out her songs (like “The Winner Takes it All”) with no brakes and lots of passion. And, if you don’t grin at “007” Brosnan, crooning away, your sense of humor is failing.

There’s a fantastic moment under the end credits when Streep, Waters and Baranski in clingy sequined suits, belt out “Dancing Queen.” At the end, Streep steps up and asks us if we want more. The audience I saw it with did -- and the trio obliged them, joined by Brosnan and the guys in similar disco garb, for a roaring rendition of “Waterloo.“ Talk about magic moments. Abba may have been pop in a world the rock critics tended to define as punk. But punk never made you feel this good.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
(Three and a half stars)
U.S.-Germany; Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog interviews men and women who live and work in the most seemingly inhospitable of habitats: Antarctica. In this great, cold, mystical film where snow and ice are the world and the light always seems a little gloomy, Herzog tells us that he hates sunlight, in both film and life -- and you briefly see his point. But it doesn’t matter if he‘s a little melancholic. As The Dark Knight can testify, we need the dark side too.
 
 


MW on DVD
Picks of the Week

NEW RELEASE

The Bank Job (Three and a half stars)
U.K. Roger Donaldson, 2008 (Lionsgate)

Roger Donaldson, that top-chop Aussie-bred action/crime director (The World‘s Fastest Indian, Smash Palace), tools up a really good, one: a fast, slick, smart and very entertaining heist/crime thriller, that works on nearly very level. Set in the ‘70s and based on fact, it’s the story of a seemingly ordinary bank robbery that goes shockingly awry when the robbers (led by Jason Statham) accidentally stumble onto safety deposit boxes that contain explosive material: high-level scandals and dark secrets for which some of the owners are ready to kill.

The movie starts off as a good solid thriller in the Asphalt Jungle tradition, and then, like Don Siegels Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau, veers off into even more complex and interesting territory, including a sharp take on Michael X, a radical chic icon of the time, and one of the gang’s troubled victims. When its cooking, which is most of the time, The Bank Job plays as if Rififi had suddenly turned into L. A. Confidential. With Saffron Burrows and David Suchet (the BBC‘s Hercule Poirot). If you have a taste for noir or neo-noir, you‘ll like this one.

CLASSIC RELEASES

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Blu-Ray) (Four stars)
U.S.; Milos Forman, 1975) (Warner)

As a young writer, future Merry Prankster Ken Kesey wrote an instant classic --a story that works no matter what form you put it in: novel, play or movie. (No one’s made a musical of “Cuckoo’s Nest” yet, but I bet that would click too. ) This Oscar-winning movie classic movie, stars Jack Nicholson in a great “Jack” turn as Randle McMurphy, a psychopathic jailbird who feigns madness to get off prison work details and winds up in a snake pit run by a psychiatric tyrant, Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Ratched, or “Big Nurse” sets out to break his spirit -- just as she has with all her other patients -- while McMurphy is hell-bent on spurring his dysfunctional buddies to mass revolt.

It’s classic ‘60s-‘’70s and a beautiful story: darkly humorous, bittersweet, poignant, irreverent. Kirk Douglas, who played McMurphy on stage (and who is actually better basic casting for the part than Jack ) reluctantly passed the property over to his son Michael (as producer) when he couldn’t get it financed. The result, scripted by Bo Goldman, directed by Milos Forman, shot by Haskell Wexler, topped by Oscar winning leads by Nicholson and Fletcher and co-starring a splendid loony lineup that includes Brad Dourif, William Redfield, Danny De Vito, Vincent Schiavelli, Will Sampson, Scatman Crothers and Sydney Lassick -- is one of the enduring classics of American cinema, and a Nicholson performance that can blow your head off.

Trafic (Three and a half stars)
France; Jacques Tati, 1970 (Criterion Collection)

Yes, it’s spelled with one “f.” And though, in a way, it represents a retrenchment for Tati -- the great comic/auteur who had just suffered his financial waterloo with his bizarre masterpiece Playtime -- it’s still a classic comedy. This time out, Tati’s ineffable M. Hulot is an absent-minded inventor who gets involved in an accident-prone Paris to Amsterdam cross country tour on his gadget-packed new camper, ending at an automotive fair, where his daffy inventions will be showcased. Tati, as much as his models Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, was a master of slapstick and, like Keaton’s, it’s dry, brilliantly mechanical slapstick. Some audiences still don’t get it. But this funny little soufflé of a road movie is studded with classic scenes about mechanical malfunctions and human pileups. It’s a delight. The extras include documentaries on Tati and the film and a booklet with a Jonathan Romney essay.

BOX SET

The American Film Theatre Collection (Four stars)
U.S.-U.K.; Various directors, 1970-75 (Kino)
    
Ely Landau’s American Film theater was a grandly idealistic experiment that deserved to last much longer than its two seasons (1974-75): Landau produced, with superb casts and top directors, classy, intelligent and high-style versions of some of the great classic and contemporary plays of the American, British and European Theatre.

The series produced or showcased some real masterpieces -- including Laurence Olivier’s magisterial film of Chekhov’s supremely poignant Three Sisters, John Frankenheimer’s electrifying version of O’Neill’s lacerating The Iceman Cometh, Peter Hall’s scathing transcription of his stage version of Pinter’s dark The Homecoming, and Joseph Losey’s return to the great play of his directorial youth Brecht’s Galileo -- plus a number of solid successes (Butley, A Delicate Balance, Lost in the Stars, In Celebration) and only a few misfires. But, even the failures are interesting: How often can you see Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, the immortal Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom of Mel Brooks‘ 1968 The Producers, cavorting together in something like Rhinoceros in roles played on stage by Orson Welles and Olivier? It fascinates, even if director Tom O’Horgan (the stage “Hair”) seems to be edging Ionesco’s absurdism too close to “Springtime for Hitler.”

Clunkers aside, this is a set that every lover of theater, and great acting, should own. Later on, Landau‘s productions began to take more liberties with the plays (Writer-actor Robert Shaw demanded that his name be removed from the AFT film of his anti-fascist trial drama The Man in the Glass Booth, even though it earned Maximilian Schell a “best actor” Oscar nomination) and the splendid series eventually ceased. A shame. Landau‘s American Film Theater should have run forever.

Included: Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” (Laurence Olivier, 1970) (Four stars). With Olivier, Joan Plowright and Derek Jacobi. Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” (John Frankenheimer, 1973) (Four stars). With Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Fredric March and Jeff Bridges -- and, from the original stage production, Joe Pedi. Harold Pinter’s “The “Homecoming” (Peter Hall, 1973) (Four stars). With Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack, Paul Rogers and Vivien Merchant. Edward Albee’s “A Delicate Balance” (Tony Richardson, 1973) (Three and a half stars). With Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield, Lee Remick, Kate Reid and Joseph Cotten.
     Bertolt Brecht’s “Galileo” (Joseph Losey, 1974) (Four stars). With Topol, John Gielgud, Margaret Leighton, Edward Fox and Patrick Magee. Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson‘s “Lost in the Stars” (Daniel Mann, 1974) (Three and a half stars). Based on Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country,” With Brock Peters, Melba Moore and Paul Rogers. Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros” (Tom O’Horgan, 1974) (Two stars). With Zero and Gene. Simon Gray’s “Butley” (Harold Pinter, 1974) (Three and a half stars).With Alan Bates and Jessica Tandy. John Osborne’s “Luther” (Guy Green, 1974) (Three stars). With Stacy Keach, Patrick Magee, Judi Dench and Robert Stephens.
     David Storey’s “In Celebration” (Lindsay Anderson, 1975) (Three and a half stars).With Alan Bates and Brian Cox. Jean Genet’s “The Maids” (Christopher Miles, 1975) (Three stars). With Glenda Jackson, Susannah York and Vivien Merchant. Robert Shaw’s “The Man in the Glass Booth” (Arthur Hiller, 1975) (Three stars). With Schell, Lois Nettleton and Luther Adler. Jacques Brel’s “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” (Denis Heroux, 1975) (Two stars). With Elly Stone and Mort Schuman. Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come” (John Quested, 1975) (Three stars). With Donal McCann, Des Cave and Siobhan McKenna.

- Michael Wilmington
July 17, 2008

July 10: Hellboy II: The Goilden Army ,Journey to the Center of the Earth, Kit Kittredge, Wanted, The Wackness, The Heartbeat Indicator, Monsieur Verdoux
July 3: Hancock, The Mother of Tears
June 26: Wall-E
June 19: Get Smart, The Love Guru, The Duchess of Langeais, Glass: A Portrait of Phillip in Twelve Parts, Up The Yangtze, The Passion of The Mao
June 12 : The Incredible Hulk,War Inc., Shotgun Stories, It Always Rains on Sundays
June 5 : Kung Fu Panda, You Don't Mess With The Zohan, Mongol, 'Tis Autumn, At The Death House Door
May 29: Sex & The City, The Strangers, Irina Palm, The Fall
May 22: Indiana Jones 4, Postal, Contempt
May 15: Prince Caspian, How The Garcia Girls Spent Their Vacation, DVD: Indiana Jones Collection
May 8: Speed Racer , Redbelt, What Happens In Vegas
May 1: Iron Man, Son Of Rambow, Flight of The Red Balloon
April 24: Tuya's Marriage, Chapter 27
April 17: My Blueberry Nights
April 10: Shine A Light, Plus Young @ Heart, Smart People, and The Forbidden Kingdom

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