The Dark Knight

Michael Caine said that The Dark Knight is the biggest movie of all time, and with the returns it’s getting, making back half its estimated $150million budget within the first week, it looks like he may have a point. It’s unavoidable, of course, a great shuddering behemoth of a thing, invading all available media, temporarily replacing the backgrounds to cinema chain websites, burrowing its way into toyshops and supermarkets, and generating such a wave of interest and semi-arm-bending-obligation that even the normally unaffected by such things will consider a trip to the flicks.

Only to bump up against the School’s Out posse flooding there en masse.

It’s a Summer Blockbuster. And the world and his 9 year old son will be heading to see it.

There’s no real need to see Christopher Nolan’s entertaining but flawed first Batman movie, although the observant, had they not, would wonder I’m sure, why Cillian Murphy pops up in the second scene to speak one line of dialogue in reprising his Scarecrow role. But then, this is a kitchen sink kinda movie; everything is going to be chucked at you.

To step back a sec, we start during a brilliantly staged heist scene, where a gang of ruthless criminals, all sporting miserable clown masks raid a bank and then gradually screw one another over until there’s just one villain left. When he rips his mask off he has another underneath. It’s a great entrance for The Joker (Heath Ledger, as if I need to tell you, see para 1) and implants him firmly in your mind. Good thing, for he vanished for a while after this, and we then move to The Batman (Christian Bale) and the new DA of Gotham, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart). And therein lies a small problem, that just started to get bigger and bigger for me. I’m no comic book or superhero aficionado, but I know Dent’s destiny, and although I won’t spoil it here, one brief visit to the movie’s cast list on IMDb will more than merely indicate what a huge stir to the plot pot is coming up.

Bruce Wayne has moved his base (Wayne Mansion was destroyed at the end of Batman Begins, you may recall) to a secret underground lab within the city, where butler Alfred (Caine) and super scientist Lucius (Morgan Freeman) help him develop his gear and clobber and gadgets and gizmos. This move against the bad guys has become a focussed attack on organised crime, which Dent – from an official angle – is also having a great deal of success with. The battle lines are drawn, then, and with a coming-together of the disparate crime gangs, trying to resolve the issue of the clampdown on their activities, it is the appearance of The Joker that galvanises them into action. His second scene, at a villains’ get-together, is one of the film’s high points, and includes a conjuring trick with a pencil that will just blow you away.

Ledger, here, is truly magnetic, a man filled to bursting with a black soul and ghoulish glee. His scenes, in fact, are all mercifully short, because it’s like feeding on too many chocolates, you just can’t help yourself, and Nolan rations his moments out throughout the film, until a splurge at the end. Although he echoes Nicholson’s performance from Tim Burton’s film – the laugh is kind of the same and there’s that croaky Jack catch in the voice – Ledger’s is a much more frightening version, because he really does lack any humanity. Nicholson started off as Jack Napier, Ledger is The Joker from the start, and you fear, he’s always been like this. My favourite image here is his puppet-y walk out of a hospital, quite quite non-human, smiling to himself as carnage roars around. Despite playing out in bright sunshine it’s the darkest moment in the entire thing, and worth the price of admission alone. I’m not sure, though, that here isn’t a danger at playing it pitch-black so consistently, with only a lop-sided smile and razor sharp black wit to add texture.

Bale’s creation is lesser simply because he hasn’t moved on since the first film in any way. He still looks extraordinarily menacing in his mask, he still emits that fearsome growl when he speaks, and he still has to kill himself to appear the arrogant rich bastard he despises. Only at the very end is there even a hint that another level exists, but essentially it’s very much the same performance as before.

The other main character, Dent, comprises Eckhart trying to tone down the shit-eating grin (and not doing too badly) and giving it his best to act outside of the Jon Bon Jovi Keep The Faith haircut every young District Attorney will apparently be sporting this year.

But beyond these three main players, there is not only a huge cast to keep happy, but a complex follow-the-money plot and a twisting Darker Than Thou game of cat and mouse set up between the main protagonists to keep the audience guessing to the end. And this is the issue really, and it’s the same issue I had with Batman Begins, in a way, that Nolan wants it all. He wants everything thrown into the mix, and with the focus shifting all over the place (including one extended and fairly unnecessary trip to Hong Kong) there is, almost from the off, an ever-worrying nagging feeling that something important may have been squeezed out and left to blow away in all the kerfuffle of action and atmos. There is, definitely, a feeling of dislocation and unconnectability, which was just my issue with a yet another Nolan/Bale/Caine piece, 2006’s The Prestige. That earlier film encapsulates the problem best, I think, in that I was consistently uneasy, and not in a good way, that simply wasn’t able to feel at home with anyone long enough to care. It’s a beautiful movie, filled with spectacle, a great fat marquee of a movie, all gloss and scope and magnitude, but there were a couple of tent pegs missing, distractedly allowing the thing to flap and flutter, and take your eye away from the action. It was a film all about plot, which asked you to be bothered about the characters, but didn’t put the work in to make that possible. In The Dark Knight, Nolan builds a huge three-ring circus with dancing elephants and juggling clowns, and the same problems, unfortunately. Your head’s elsewhere, you’re forever wishing you could be back in the scene just gone, just for a little longer. You can be bashed over the head with stupendous imagery – and there’s plenty of that here – but for 152 minutes without actually sitting down with these people to find out who they are?

There are some brilliant sequences in The Dark Knight, there is a terrific forty minutes or so in middle of the film where it really takes hold and delivers. Check the interrogation scene, where two men in masks try and discover who the other one really is. At this point, I really wanted it to take off by extending this, following it, seeing it develop, a bit more wordplay, a stab at development, the risk of taking a wordy route to discovery and potentially unveiling weaknesses. But, alas, it soon devolves to more threat and violence. Not that this isn’t well done, of course.

Ultimately, everyone, not just the characters, but everyone, Nolan included, even the film itself, wears a mask of sorts. You would have hoped, given the runtime, that we might have been allowed a peep behind the facade, and seen a few of these people for what they really are, and allowed a bit of a sit down and extended chat with people so that you might care when one or two of them are blown to smithereens.

Mamma Mia!

I am so not the audience for this.

I know, disclaimer, but fuck it, it has to be said.

Mamma Mia! as if you need telling, is the story of a young girl on a Greek island, whose ‘free-spirited’ mom (now a hotel owner) had three flings one summer twenty years earlier, such that she doesn’t know which of the trio is her real Dad. With her wedding imminent, the girl invites the group of aging suitors along (without telling her mother) to try and get the most fitting one to give her away.

With hilarious consequences. And songs.

This is a great fat farce of broad comedy and silly situations, played out in a simplistic Set Up, Joke, Set Up, Joke format that would make Gerald Thomas and Peter Rogers blush with embarrassment. If seeing Julie Walters fall off a boat into the sea is your idea of comedic perfection, then this is the film for you. There was certainly enough screeching hilarity ringing in my ears to suggest that there is indeed a substantial group of the population just ready to lap this up, and neither happy nor willing to ask why she was standing up in the dingy in the first place, rather than sitting, like everyone else would. Possibly wearing an “I’m Going To Purposefully Fall In” t-shirt would have telegraphed the ‘joke’ a little sooner, but it’s debatable.

But, hey, people laughed.

And they sang, too. I mentioned the songs, right?

Well, of course, you knew that, obviously, but it really needs to be hammered home, because in-between the numbers I disappeared into a shell of denial, thoroughly refusing to acknowledge what had just happened and what was just about to happen. Songs. Abba songs, pointed out with huge neon arrows of predictability before the first notes are sung. Crowbarred in like shoving diamonds back into the mine, the silliness of building a musical around songs written to be listened to as individual pieces really does hit home almost immediately.

Much has been said about the singing, some of which catches a fleeting glimpse of adequate, but which is mostly fairly poor. I guess I’m supposed not to care, that the essential feeling of joi de vivre and untethered recklessness is its own reward. That it’s all about fun? And it is fun, I can’t deny that, but it’s artifice. In Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, the song Send in the Clowns has often been handed to an actress unaccustomed to musical theatre who doesn’t normally have ‘a voice’. Liz Taylor in the movie, Judi Dench on the stage. Many people attack it because of the faltering cracked delivery that’s sometimes used, but that’s the whole point. Desirée is reflecting on the ironies and disappointments of her life, which include her rejection of a marriage proposal twenty years earlier. Meeting the same man after so many years, she finds that he is now in an unhappy marriage. She proposes to marry him, but he declines. It is this rejection that prompts the song, and the broken and cracked-open bitterness. It doesn’t matter how good a vocalist the person playing Desirée is, just that she imbues the song with the right sentiment.

So what’s everyone’s excuse here? The young girl is good, Meryl Streep as her Mom isn’t bad either, but beyond that this is ‘Allo ‘Allo with a soundtrack.

Phyllida Lloyd, the director might by saying with a smile, “Don’t you love farce? My fault I fear. I thought that you’d want what I want.”

Sorry, my dear.

The Mist

The Mist, Frank Darabont’s latest adaptation from a Stephen King source, contains none of the sickly sentiment that hamstrung The Green Mile, nor the too-perfect plot contrivances and heartrending platitudes that, to be fair, worked so well against expectation in The Shawshank Redemption. In fact, it would be almost impossible, I’d suggest, to find a movie so far removed from those two All Time Faves in the snuggle-up-and-feel-cosy stakes, because The Mist is probably one of the bleakest films I have seen, not just in a long time, but ever. Never has apocalyptic hopelessness and fear been so unrelentingly rolled out across its audience. This is a pitch black movie. It is unforgivingly dark and horrible. Expect a final redemptive walk along the beach at Zihuatanejo with this one, and you’ll go home unhappy.

Heck, you’re gonna go home unhappy whatever you expect.

Yet, we start in an idyllic spot. Maine, bog standard King territory, where a typical King Everyman, the boringly-monikered David Drayton (Thomas Jane), sits in a lovely slatboard home, with his gorgeous kid and beautiful wife. He’s yer average Joe, with a bit of a conscience, a splodge of creativity, no little intelligence and a stand-straight attitude. Not unlike Andy Dufresne, you might say, not unlike Paul Edgecomb. Easy going, normal guys, about to be pitch-forked into a situation that will test them beyond the limits of normal endurance.

Only, Andy and Paul never had to deal with this.

The movie opens with a massive, destructive storm, where David’s house is wrecked, and that of his neighbour similarly damaged. Two massive trees have crashed down, destroying parts of their respective properties and, although previously at loggerheads over an old dispute, they decide to head off into town (David with his little boy, Billy) to get equipment to repair the mess. As the shoppers mooch around the only store, a very sudden and strange mist descends on the little town. Just as it appears, a bloodied and terrified man runs across to the supermarket, screaming that his friend has been attacked and taken by ’something’ lurking in the fog.

Scared, the townsfolk slam the doors shut on the rapidly encroaching miasma.

From here, things start to take a dramatic and gruesome turn. Small parties bond together and head out, never to be seen again, screams ripping through the gloom. Then, incredibly, out of the mist, come wave after wave of spine-tingling monsters; great locusty bugs, flying lizard things, massive scuttling spiders and a horrifyingly large ’something’ too far away in the murk to be properly glimpsed. These creatures are fiercely bloodthirsty, and the carnage in the shop is startlingly unpleasant.

Between the waves of the attacks, the dynamics of the group begin to alter dramatically. Unstable Mrs Carmody begins to spout huge tracts of Old Testament fire and brimstone which, as the situation gets worse and worse, bring more and more people to her cause. They begin to demand blood, expiation, to keep the monsters at bay. David and his decreasing band of cohorts, try to see the situation as calmly as they may, despite the horrors, but steadily theirs is the minority view. Ollie (Toby Jones, as always note perfect), the resourceful store clerk, cuts to the chase:

Quote:

You can’t convince some people there’s a fire even when their hair is burning. Denial is a powerful thing…As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up ways to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?

And at some point in all this chaos, social division and unknown, inexplicable horror, the penny should drop. This, and thank goodness, what joy, is the finest allegorical horror film since Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers subtly integrated a dark political subtext and ambiguity into its simple tale of alien abduction. That terrific sense of post-war, anti-communist paranoia, the metaphor for the tyranny of the McCarthy era, here it finds a perfect sister. The huge destructive opening, the twin trees crashing, the bonding together of previously antagonised groups (David is white, his neighbour black), this insularity, the ignorance of what’s “out there”, the rise of the religious zealots…not for nothing is the movie’s tagline Fear Changes Everything. This is stirring and emotional stuff, and it’s very very well done.

And it never lets up. I will not give away the ending, for it is earth-shattering. But it is simply unbelievable that a mainstream Hollywood studio (Dimension) didn’t try and force Darabont’s hand to change some of this to something more upbeat and palatable; there are so many stop-offs along the way that will make you wide-eyed with disbelief that an American film-maker is making the points he is. Brave and bold, that’s what it is. The Happening would have loved to be a tenth as good as this.

I am still, 24 hours later, in shock at the way it all ends, one of the darkest conclusions I can remember, all washed across you with an icy blast of the great Dead Can Dance’s mind-shredding The Host Of Seraphim. At this final moment, both imagery and soundtrack combine to create a cold, ruthless, harrowing and uncompromising slice of razor sharp pessimism. This is that wonderful thing; a horror movie that makes you think; a horror movie that bursts out of its genre limitations; a horror movie that isn’t awful, but genuinely, bitingly horrible.

Kung Fu Panda

The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother!” and “O blow!” and also “stuff this for a game of soldiers!” and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something loud and brash and with an accent! was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the graveled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, “Up we go! Up we go!” till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight, and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a thin grass merge next to an enormous shopping mall.

“Er, OK,” he said to himself. “Well, it’s better than whitewashing!” The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the clamour of youthful screams and chavvy insults across the car park fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the car park till he reached the first few shops on the further side.

“Oi! Big nose!” said a spotty youth outside a big sign that said ‘The Gap’. “Wot you fucken lookin’ at?!” He was bowled over in an instant by the impatient and contemptuous Mole, who trotted along the side of the shops trying to ignore the other kids as they peeped from under their hoodies to see what the row was about. “Onion sauce! Onion sauce!” he remarked jeeringly, and was gone before they could think of a thoroughly satisfactory reply. Then they all started grumbling at each other. “Fag, slag! Give us a toke on that J, you mong-” “Up yours, cockmunch!” “You gay-” and so on, in the usual way; but, of course, it was then much too late, and the Mole was out of ear-range.

It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the Mall he rambled busily, along the shopfronts, past the fast food joints and the pound shops selling needless tat , finding everywhere teenage mums, miserable kids, damaged pensioners, overweight yobs – everything grim, and boorish, and bored. And instead of having an uneasy conscience pricking him and whispering, “Whitewash!” he somehow could only feel how jolly it was to be the only happy being among all these hate-filled citizens. After all, the best part of a holiday is perhaps not so much to be resting yourself, as to see all the other fellows busy dying inside.

He thought his happiness was complete when, as he meandered aimlessly along, suddenly he stood by the edge of a cinema. Never in his life had he seen a cinema before — this sleek, chrome, full-bodied corporate beast, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver — glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the cinema he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spellbound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he stood at the ticket office and bought admission to Kung Fu Panda, while the cinema still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea of tide-washed unwashed humanity.

As he stood there, a dark hole opened and swallowed him up. Screen 6. Dreamily he fell to considering what a nice snug dwelling place it would make for an animal with few wants and fond of a bijou cosy residence,. As he gazed at the swathe of adverts for cars and fat-drenched bad-for-you food, something bright and small seemed to twinkle down in the heart of it, vanished, then twinkled once more like a tiny star. The film was starting! But it could hardly be a star in such an unlikely situation; this was the panda, wasn’t it? Then, as he looked, it winked at him, and so declared itself to be comedian; and a small face began gradually to grow up round it, like a frame round a picture.

A white fat face, with whiskers.

A grave round face, with the same twinkle in its eye that had first attracted his notice.

Small neat ears and thick silky hair.

It was Jack Black!

Then the two creatures stood and regarded each other cautiously.

“Hullo, Mole!” said the Jack.

“Hullo, Jack!” said the Mole.

“Would you like to watch the movie?” inquired Jack presently.

“Oh, it’s all very well to talk,” said the Mole, rather pettishly, he being new to a cinema and cinema life and its ways.

Jack said nothing, but stooped and let down a drawbridge, and asked Mole to step on it and follow him into the screen…Then he held up his hand as the Mole stepped gingerly down. “Lean on that!” he said. “Now then, step lively!” and the Mole to his surprise and rapture found himself actually seated in the screen.

“This has been a wonderful day!” said he, as Jack smiled devilishly at him again, raising a naughty little eyebrow again. “Do you know, I’ve never been in a movie before in all my life.”

“What?” cried Jack, open-mouthed: “Never been in a — you never — well, I—what have you been doing, then?”

“Is it so nice as all that?” asked the Mole shyly, though he was quite prepared to believe it as he felt the movie swagger lightly around him.

“Nice? It’s the only thing,” said Jack solemnly, as he smiled and gurned again out into the dark. “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in movies. Simply messing,” he went on dreamily: “messing — about — in — movies; messing—”

“Yeah, OK, I get that” cried the Mole sullenly. “Messing. What else do you do?”

But was too late. The movie struck a rock full tilt. The dreamer, the joyous Jack Black, lay on his back his heels in the air, guffawing, well, devilishly. Again.

“— about in movies — or with movies,” Jack went on composedly, picking himself up with a pleasant laugh. “In or out of ‘em, it doesn’t matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you say anything worthwhile, or whether you just fuck about pointlessly, or whether you never say anything at all, you’re always busy, and earning millions, and yet you never have to do anything original in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not. Look here! If you’ve really nothing else on hand this morning, supposing we make a movie together? You just have to shout and say silly things.”

The Mole waggled his toes.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“I think so,” said Jack, “there are other people involved, but really they’re only looking at me. I just riff on my usual shit.”

“Even dressed as a panda?”

“Yep.”

But the Mole never heard a word he was saying after that. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the gravy train and dreamed long waking dreams of graduating from Saturday Night Live and making fat wodges of dosh.

Hancock

I’m angry. Like the Hulk.

Since Nolan’s Batman showed the Superhero genre how to do the decent thing, I’ve been living in hope that someone else might have the cajones to take up the baton and do something similar, or, imagine this, do something even better. It can’t be that difficult, surely? Some character development, some insight, an arc or two to follow to make you care for the protagonists…? If the very best 25-minute sitcoms can get you to give a rat’s ass about people rapidly sketched out in stricter time constraints, surely a 90-minute movie can take time out from the explosions and destruction to do something similar?

I was delighted, then, to take in the first 50 minutes of Will Smith’s new blockbuster, Hancock, which really was trying hard to do something different, and dammit if it wasn’t actually more engaging that the Nolan effort, at least initially.

Hancock is more than a little washed-up, he is, in fact, a total bum. An alcoholic who we first find sleeping it off on a bus stop bench in central LA, with a little kid pulling his arm and pointing into a TV shop window where numerous screens are showing a news report of an armed chase on the highway. Hungover and clumsy, Hancock flies off, and apprehends the villains, creating untold millions of dollars’ worth of damage in the process. It’s a very funny sequence, utilising some seamless CGI that doesn’t detract from Smith’s terrifically grumpy performance of a man interrupted mid-snore by the tedious duty of trying to do the right thing.

It’s this incompetent stab at fulfilling his duty that is proving his downfall in the eyes of the LA population. Destroying everything in his path to bring the bad guys to book, Hancock is simply rubbish at the way he goes about it, and gloriously short-tempered in response to his critics. Stinking of booze, looking like the bottom of a dumpster and quick to turn on the people he’s supposedly helping (“I can smell alcohol on your breath!” “That’s cause I’ve been drinking, bitch!”, or, when a tubby chap has a go: “Somebody should sue you!” “You know what? You should sue McDonalds, cuz they fucked you up!”) is no great way of getting the public to love him, either. But it’s very very funny, and the wordplay of the irritable is always well worth listening to, as any Victor Meldrew fan will attest.

This situation is added to very neatly when Hancock rescues idealistic PR man, Ray (Jason Bateman), who decides to improve the anti-hero’s status by sending him voluntarily to jail, so that he can appear to be taking responsibility for his mistakes, and giving LA time to realise they actually need him. Cue a seriously funny example of how to ensure you never get any trouble in prison ever…

At this point, I’m settling in very nicely to what’s been served up. Much of the story inbetween the laughs is actually quite serious, and there are moments where Hancock suffers a lonely sobriety that make you think there really is more to the man than just a funny drunk. A thread of darkness never hurt even the most comical of characters, and there’s that here, certainly.

And then you approach the hour mark, and it’s ruined. And I mean, ruined. Totally broken in half by a groan-making twist of such epic unnecessariness that if you’re planning on seeing this soon, I’d suggest you actually get up and walk out at the midway point. After Will Smith carries a very drunk Bateman up to his room and then wishes him a good night, do yourself a favour; leave. At that point, get up and go. The twist in the next scene is one of the worst I think I can ever remember.

Seriously. The huge paradigm shift in Psycho when Marion is killed and the stolen cash plot evaporates, the vampire reveal in the previously crime/road movie From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, both of these turned those films on their heads. But in a good way. Here, Man Alive, here it’s just awful. I won’t give it away, I’m not that mean, and I still have the goodwill of the first half implanted in the back of my mind, but had I been on my own I’d have screamed “Whyyyyyy?! at the screen. It’s really that painful.

What I wanted was Hancock to go back to jail after each call-out and work his way through some kind of redemption, and search out his turn-to-drink demons and face up to his loneliness. What I got was mess of exposition and easy answers that created a WHAM!BANG! finalé, and then faded to nothing in the dying seconds.

What an awful waste. Can you hear that roar? It’s my primal scream of rage calling The Dark Knight to come to the rescue.

first half
second half
overall