Batman Begins

Batman Begins marks the fifth appearance of Batman in a major motion picture, and eight years since the caped crusader’s franchise crashed and burned under the stewardship of Joel Schumacher, who directed both Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. I must say that it has recovered quite nicely from the neon makeover that Mr. Schumacher gave it in the mid nineties, and has reclaimed some of the gothic charm that it had when Tim Burton was directing the films. This time it’s Christopher Nolan who directs and co writes this account of Batman’s battle against criminality, and Christian Bail who plays Batman/Bruce Wayne. Co-starring with Bail are Michael Caine as Alfred, and a very badly miscast Katie Holmes as Wayne’s Lawyer girlfriend,
Rachel Dawes. Cillian Murphy, as the cherubically psychotic professor Jonathon Crane, Gary Oldman, as police lieutenant Jim Gordon, and Liam Niessen, as chief villain, are valuable additions to the cast.

The film is essentially the story of Batman’s origins (as one might expect from the title). We see how he was trained to fight the good fight by a secret organization known as the League of Shadows in an unnamed Himalayan country, and how he returns to Gotham City, discovers a number of high tech gadgets and some really cool body armour in the basement of Wayne Enterprises, assumes his identity as the Dark Knight Detective, a.k.a. the Batman, and, of course, saves Gotham from a calamitous event at the end of the film.

My reasons for liking this film are two-fold. Christopher Nolan doesn’t seem to have an agenda in making this film other than providing movie-going audiences with entertainment. He isn’t trying to pay homage to horror films of the 1930s or 40s like Tim Burton did in Batman and Batman Returns, nor make Batman family-friendly like Joel Schumacher did in Batman Forever.

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Originally posted by remind:
Great stuff CMOT, now they will for sure have you do a review for the next Batman, and perhaps other films as well. Hopefully it will work into a continuous publishing gig for you!

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Serenity

Serenity is based on Firefly, a short lived TV series created for the Fox Network by Joss Whedon, the man behind the the cult television show Buffy The Vampire Slayer.
Firefly was a space Western in the truest sense of the word. It had six guns and spaceships, horses and laser pistols, intergalactic empires and train robberies.

The program centered around a band of misfits and criminals on a transport ship called Serenity, who would engage in smuggling, scavenging and other nefarious activities to survive while steering clear of the Alliance, a galaxy wide confederation of planets, similar to Star Trek’s Federation but with cooler uniforms. It had dynamic characters and interesting story lines. The viewer felt that every character, from Jayne, the boorish mercenary, to River, the fugitive psychic, was worth caring about. Unfortunately, in spite of, or perhaps because of these qualities, the Fox Network mishandled and ultimately cancelled the show.

Fox then made the wise decision to release the entire series on DVD. It sold spectacularly well, and Universal then decided to produce a movie with the same crew, set essentially in the same universe.

Serenity picks up where the t.v. series ended, but now the crew is running from an Alliance assassin who wants to kidnap River because her mind is filled with classified government information. After many trials and tribulations, including some wonderful space combat, the crew reveals River’s secrets and gives the Alliance a black-eye.

The movie Serenity suffered because it had to prematurely finnish a number of sub-plots that had been established in the show, and this both interupted the the film flow as a major motion picture and also failed to do justice to those sub plots themselves.

Sad. Fuck capitalism.

[ 06 May 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Yes, well the movie really put the last nail in that coffin, sadly.

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Every tweedy classics professor worth his salt knows the story of Beowulf. The young, proud Norse warrior from Geatland (southern Sweden) travels to Denmark, slays a horrible monster, dispatches its mother, and saves the kingdom of King Rothgar. Beowulf returns to Sweden, becomes a king and dies battling a fire-breathing dragon.

The tale is very old, the first story written down in English. Given that, you’d think that the creative film makers in Hollywood would leave the story alone and would not give it the blockbuster treatment. Unfortunately this is not the case.

This relatively recent film adaptation of the legend has Beowulf being seduced by Grendel’s mother thereby being granted great power. The dragon is shown to be Beowulf’s son, a product of the seduction, and the kingdom that Beowulf governs is inherited from Rothgar, none of which are true to the Beowulf epic.

Putting aside the discrepancies in the movie’s narrative, (there have to be some since if the writers had written a script that follows the story too closely, any movie-going audience would have been bored, except perhaps Beowulf purists), the way this film was made is a bit strange. Although real actors are used to play the characters, they are presented on screen as computer-generated images. This way of creating a film may be cheaper, but it is a little odd to see Anthony Hopkins’ face grafted onto a cartoon character. It’s somewhat difficult to empathise with such characters, especially given that they are so one-dimensional to begin with.

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Originally posted by CMOT Dibbler:
Why aren't there more movies featuring small towns.... What discourages people in the film industry from making films in small communities? Is it more expensive to shoot in smaller places?

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Buffy the Vampire slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer originally made her pop culture debut in 1992, as the main character in a low budget horror movie titled, not surprisingly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The film focused on how Buffy (Kristy Swanson) a vapid Californian Cheerleader and high school student, discovers that she is one of a long line of warriors destined to battle the undead. This realization causes her to grow as a person and makes it possible for her to save her friends from being eaten by vampires and kill the villainous Lothos, the head vampire of a group of blood-sucking fiends that threatens her entire community.

Also featured in the movie were Donald Sutherland as Buffy’s mentor in the art of vampire slaying, and Luke Perry as the love interest. It had a terrible box office showing, not surprising since the movie was boring with a poor script and bad special effects.

Joss Whedon, the scriptwriter of the doomed effort, maintains that his work was meddled with and rewritten behind the scenes. He left the set during production and didn’t return.

It was not until 1997 that he was convinced to bring his spunky cheerleading heroine back from media oblivion. This time as part of a television series, once again titled Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had the same premise as the movie, but was truer to the film’s original concept. The series featured Anthony Stewart Head as Buffy’s mentor and Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy. The show ran for seven years, and was a cult hit. It dealt with issues like abusive relationships, sexuality and peer pressure, all the time using supernatural creatures as metaphors for these problems. Personally I think it flagged in the last two seasons and should have run for only five.

Whedon’s trademark wit was allowed to shine through on the small screen and he provided us with a cast of interesting characters, including Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Principal Schneider (Arman Schimmerman), the misanthropic head of the highschool; and, of course, Buffy’s school chums played by Alison Hannigan and Nicholas Brendan. There was also Angel, Buffy’s vampire boyfriend, played by David Boreanaz, a character who would eventually get his very own show.

The unfortunate thing about the series, is that although it is funny, exciting and well written, it is also grounded in its time. The humor in particular is centered around contemporary popular culture, which means that in 10 or 20 years time it will stop being so amusing. It will be a sad day when that happens, but I do still enjoy the show and would recommend it to any fan of sci-fi and horror.

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The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight begins where Christopher Nolan’s first Batman movie ended, with Batman battling criminal elements in Gotham. With the help of Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) he puts many high profile gangsters in jail. So desperate is the mob to stop the Batman, that they turn to the Joker (Heath Ledger) to solve their problem. This results in mayhem and death and, of course, a final confrontation, in which our hero naturally prevails.

Heath Ledger plays an exquisitely creepy version of the Joker. He is certainly the best part of this movie. Unlike Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of the clown prince of crime in Tim Burton’s Batman, there is no machismo exuded by Ledger’s character. This Joker seems pathetic, he’s the guy who got beaten up on his way to chess club in high school, only he’s horribly scarred and has access to a bazooka and explosives.

It is a shame Ledger died at the start of such a promising acting career. I will miss him.

I thought that this second installment of the new Batman trilogy would be of the same quality as Batman Begins. Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed.
The Dark Knight is a lumbering cinematic monster of a film with too much action, too many story elements and some plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through.

If the creators of this film had eliminated some of the action sequences and the movie’s second disfigured sociopath, and chosen instead to focus on Batman’s conflict with the Joker, it would have been at least 20 minutes shorter and a much better movie.

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Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain is the story of a torrid romance between Jake Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Inis Delmar (Heath Ledger), two ranch hands in Wyoming in the early 1960s.
The film follows their romance over following years, with all its trials and tribulations, and eventually ends sadly. Both leading men do an excellent job of portraying their characters. The script, direction and music are all excellent.
It is an important movie because it deals with the difficulties faced by working class gay men and their families in a rural environment.
Unlike the movie Philadelphia, it shows that gay relationships can be imperfect, and shows us their struggles as they come to terms with their identities. Unlike The Birdcage they are not portrayed as caricatures, their suffering is real and poignant.
It is not a revolutionary film ( mainstream Hollywood seems incapable of making dramas about truly happy gay couples) but it is as close as they have come to a realistic depiction of gay love in the deeply homophobic U.S.

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Originally posted by jas:
Re: The Lookout

Just sayin'...

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I expect it's about getting permission to use the shooting premises.

In a large city I expect it's easier to get permission from enough places to make it look like 'the whole city'.

My guess anyway.