Dark Knight best comic adaptation yet
The Dark Knight is a bleak masterpiece. Idealism is crushed, love is lost and the good guys don’t always come out on top. It’s everything it could have been and more.
Comic book movies have notoriously focused on the fantastical, and campy scenery. For some reason, likely in an effort to appeal to younger children, darkness was always sacrificed for light. Villains were always just a bit over the top to remove any connection to reality.
But what about an adult comic adaptation?
Batman Begins started the trend, and The Dark Knight may have perfected it.
Director Christopher Nolan broke into the mainstream with his second film Memento in 2000, a psychological thriller about a man losing his mind and memory. The same psychological element is present in the new Batman film and it’s what fully sets it apart from other comic book movies.
The Joker. Heath Ledger is perfect. In a role that could have easily fallen into cartoon territory, Ledger instead channels everything terrifying about clowns and the human psyche.
He prances around, light on his feet and harmless until he makes a pencil disappear.
This version of the Joker is a trickster that cannot be trusted. He tells a story about the scars on his face that gives him a permanent smile in the form of a Glasgow grin. He first tells a tale of how his father drank and wanted to put a smile on his face, but the next time he “reveals” his past it’s different… In the end he is a mystery.
The most fascinating aspect of the Joker is that he is not driven by traditional motivating factors. Money is nothing to him, except leverage. He just wants to incite chaos as a social experiment – to see if everyone else will become savages when their security blanket is removed and torn to shreds.
Gotham City’s new District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) appears to be the opposite of the Joker. He is cleaning up the streets through procedure and the law. He is willing to take the bull by the horns and clean up Gotham of crime.
Things obviously don’t go as planned and the public cries for the arrest of Batman. The logic being that Batman spitting in the face of organized crime only enhanced their violence instead of ridding the city of it. Instead of bending, Dent responds by saying “the night is always darkest before the dawn.” His idealistic point of view doesn’t exactly hold true, however.
Throughout the film, Batman sticks to the shadows and Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne contemplates retirement of the caped crusader. He sees Dent as the hero Gotham has needed, a tangible face instead of an abstract symbol like Batman.
Dark Knight is less about action than it is character and suspense. The theme of duality is ever present. Joker believes that at a base level everyone is capable of doing terrible things, of killing or being killed.
Ledger can only be described as shocking in the role.
Joker is despicable, exactly what he should be. Eckhart is just as good as Dent. Fans of Batman comics will already know happens to the character Harvey Dent, but his aesthetic change in Dark Knight is still both haunting and tragic.
Bale takes a back seat for the most part in the latest film, or perhaps the Batman story arc is just less interesting than that of Joker and Dent. Either way, Nolan transcends the traditional comic book motif and instead has woven an intricate crime movie here with great visuals and tragically powerfully performances.
All that aside, the action in the film cannot be ignored either. The opening bank robbery is reminiscent of 1995’s Heat and apparently Nolan drew some influence from Michael Mann in the scene. A chase scene through the tunnels of Gotham is frenetic and intense despite feeling a bit like an extended video game level. Still, it’s all worth it.
This is the best comic book adaptation of all time.
5 stars out of 5
Pineapple Express provides mellow buzz
With Mama Mia! gracing Woodstock’s movie theatre, there are thankfully other options if musicals are not your cup of tea.
Judd Apatow, who directed Knocked Up and The 40-year Old Virgin, and produced Superbad, Anchorman and this year’s under-the-radar comedy: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, returns as producer and has reassembled his ragtag group of familiar faces for Pineapple Express, an action-comedy fueled by marijuana smoke.
It would be easy to describe Pineapple Express as Dazed and Confused meets Beverly Hills Cop, but that’s a fairly lazy comparison.
Seth Rogen (Knocked Up) plays Dale Denton, a process server, meaning he issues subpoenas while dressed in ridiculous costumes and gets high every other second of the day.
James Franco (Spider-Man) is Saul, a drug dealer with a fetish for civil engineering.
Denton smokes to unwind and relax, and tries to escape any kind of relationship with Saul other than their strictly business arrangement. But Saul introduces him to a rare strain of pot and Denton is the only client to have access to it.
The rare strain is called… Pineapple Express.
Denton meanwhile goes to serve a subpoena one day and while sitting in his car toking away, he sees a man get killed. He tosses the joint and rams into a couple cars before speeding off in a panic.
Because of how rare the strain is, the murderer (Gary Cole) who happens to be Saul’s weed supplier traces the joint back to Saul and Denton.
The chase begins.
It’s a simple set up, with a whole lot of convenient occurrences to get Saul and Denton running from their would-be assassins.
The story is cumbersome, not because it is unbelievable but because the scenes aren’t strung together very coherently. They do not blend into one another. Instead the film feels like a series of individual vignettes with humourous characters that meet at the end of the film.
What is done really well is the satire of ‘80s action movies, right down to the synthesized musical score. Certain death is averted several times over and there is an unlimited supply of guns and ammo, and a few one-liners that would make ole Arnie tear up with nostalgia.
Pineapple Express skewers films like Lethal Weapon. It’s not trying to but would you expect anything less from Apatow and company?
They’re sarcastic jokesters and despite the explosions, the comedy is in the same vein as Apatow’s other big hits. At some point it’s going to get stale, and it is starting to here.
There were moments (the subplot of Denton’s high school girlfriend) that missed the mark.
Normally length is not an issue in Apatow films, but Pineapple Express goes on about fifteen minutes too long. Some scenes could have been cut down by a full two minutes or exorcised completely and the film would have been more streamlined.
This is the same problem the show Family Guy has. Stretching a joke out for five minutes does not make it funny, it only makes it irritating.
Pineapple Express does offer enough solid laughs and surprising lines to keep it from being a waste of time. Rogen and Franco work well together, re-uniting from their days on the short-lived Apatow television show, Freaks and Geeks.
Director David Gordon Green is an odd selection to say the least. His debut film in 2000, George Washington, was a quaint indie feature about impoverished African American children in the rural south. Eight years and several indie flicks later he’s helming a ‘pot and explosions,’ absurdist spoof. Talk about breaking type!
Pineapple Express is uneven but pleasant if a bit violent and vulgar at times. It does seem like Apatow and company are just copying and pasting their humour on a different genre but when it’s funny it’s really funny.
Too bad Tropic Thunder is only opening in Fredericton, because that could be the comedy of the summer. Good news for Abba enthusiasts, the Mama Mia! experience has come to town. Everyone else, go see Pineapple Express or wait for Tropic Thunder.
Pineapple Express • 3 stars out of 5
This review originally appeared in the August 19 edition of the Carleton FreePress
Traitor—a political thriller that doesn’t
The political thriller, like any film genre, is a mixed bag.
The best political thrillers–like JFK and Munich–are though-provoking works of cinematic art. Although there may be questions about their historical accuracies, they are well-crafted films designed to broaden the viewer’s perspective.
Traitor could have been in that realm of filmmaking–but it’s nowhere close.
Don Cheadle’s is one of the most consistent and reliable actors in Hollywood. From roles in Boogie Nights to Hotel Rwanda and everything in between he has shown comedic chops and strong dramatic presence.
Even in Traitor as Sámi, a Muslim born in Sudan but raised in Chicago with supposed ties to a terrorist organization in Yemen, he makes the most of the material he’s given.
Sámi delivers bombs to a meeting place staked out by the FBI. Sámi and those around him are apprehended, except for the few that are killed in the raid.
Given the opportunity to act as informant to FBI agents Clayton and Archer (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough) Sámi turns them down and accepts an indefinite prison sentence. Of course it wouldn’t be much of a movie if it ended there so he and his accomplices break out with the help of police–or maybe it was people disguised as police. It’s not clear in the film what they really were, and that is this movie’s main shortcoming. Nothing is ever clear.
Samir is taken to Marseilles by Omar, a subordinate extremist with a penchant for chess – it’s how the two bonded in prison. How sweet! Obviously chess metaphors enter the dialogue in this lazy screenplay to dumb down what should be a complex film.
“You have to sacrifice a couple pawns to win the battle,” Omar tells Samir as justification for convincing people to perform suicide bombings.
It’s amazing that Cheadle can keep a straight face when fed a line like that.
Remember the FBI agents? You didn’t think they’d be gone did you? And they aren’t. They’re constantly on Samir’s trail to raise the bar of intensity and it doesn’t stop there! Behind door number three is the mole inside the FBI tactical team working on that exact case.
Convenience! Plot devices! Traitor has it all.
It wouldn’t be so bad if any of these tertiary characters were fleshed out a little more. Agent Archer is the tough cop. Clayton is the intellectual cop from a long line of Baptist ministers.
This is a shame because Guy Pearce deserves better. Every few years he gets a role that should propel him to the A-list (L.A. Confidential, Memento, and The Proposition). But he always returns to semi-obscurity.
Pearce is criminally underused in an underwritten part that could have effectively created the Yin to Samir’s Yang. Instead their foil is nothing more than a contrived cat-and-mouse game with no payoff.
The film jumps from France to England to Canada to the United States in a globe- trotting, terrorist adventure culminating in a huge plot to devastate the American people. Without giving anything away, the twist is telegraphed from a long way out. It’s far too obvious to have any effect.
Where Traitor succeeds from time to time is in the religious debate. It may be presented too simplistically but it’s there all the same.
It’s not a “rah-rah” hate fest on the Muslim religion– instead there is an attempt to depict Muslims as human, which is more than CNN does.
There is an ethical conundrum here. How many innocent people need to die to prove a point? The answer, presented by one of the terrorist leaders, is there are no innocent people left in the United States. In a democracy the leader is supposed to represent the interest of the people and thus, in reverse, the people are responsible for the leader’s actions.
Traitor could have been a great film—or even a good one. But it’s neither. It’s generic and forgettable but a better watch than last year’s terrorist-action flick The Kingdom. It falls into the middle ground of political thrillers; not as good as Syriana but an improvement on Rendition.
Here’s an interesting fact. Comedian Steve Martin came up with the story idea. The only other time he’s been involved with a serious movie is David Mamet’s crime caper The Spanish Prisoner. It was a much more memorable film.
Maybe Martin should have been in this one, too. It sure needed something
2/5 stars
This review originally appeared in the September 2 edition of the Carleton FreePress
Bangkok Dangerous is dungkok dumb
Nicolas Cage is out of his mind. His newest hair plugs must be rooted into his temporal lobe because no sane person would ever agree to star in Bangkok Dangerous.
When it’s all over, seek out a policeman and ask for a victim-impact statement form to fill out. This movie will violate you if you actually choose to see it.
Bangkok Dangerous is so bad it’s embarrassing. Any amateur writer who watches this will likely weep—or even gain hope–seeing that tripe like this was produced. It indicates that anything can and will probably be made.
The only redeeming factor of this dung pile is the lessons that surely will be based on it in film schools: how not to make a movie.
Everything is third rate, and that’s a generous assessment. The colouration is dark, so dark that only parts of the screen are visible. Is this supposed to show how dank and corrupt the world of a hitman is? That’s some deep thinking.
Joe (Cage) is supposed to be this aging assassin going through the motions as he does his final job before drifting off into the sunset. He has four straightforward rules that he announces ever so stoically in a voice-over near the beginning. And of course he breaks them all! Screenwriting 101 folks, this is how you make it in Hollywood!
He’s supposed to be this bad-ass who forms no human emotional attachments because they get in the way of his job. So immediately he hires a guy named Kong to be his courier and sure enough Kong figures Joe out.
Instead of killing him like he normally would (at least that’s what he says in the ever-present voice-over) he takes the guy under his wing. This doesn’t make any sense at all. There is no purpose other than to create a subplot to a film with no plausible main plot.
There is no character development either. There are a couple montages where Joe trains Kong and he starts to get a handle on things but that’s about the extent of it. What reason does anyone have to care for these characters? Just because they are supposed to be the protagonists doesn’t mean an audience will automatically care two cents about what happens to them.
The worst scene – and this was very difficult to determine – is when Joe takes Kong with him on a hit. Joe and Kong hire a boat to track the target down a canal– a high traffic canal where there is a good chance they will be seen.
So they get stuck in traffic, the target notices them and starts his getaway. Joe chases after him and blah blah blah.
There is no conceivable way Joe would put himself in such an impossible situation. His whole point of being an assassin is living in the shadows where no one sees him! Donning a Hawaiian shirt and a funny hat does not conceal the fact that he’s carrying a semi-automatic rifle!
To top it all off, Joe falls in love with a deaf-mute pharmacist. Their scenes together are awkward. They walk together; go to a Buddhist temple and then BAM! They’re in love.
Come on! This is ridiculous!
What happened to Nicolas Cage?
Cage has shown great diversity in his 20-plus years on screen. He has done screwball comedies like Raising Arizona. He won an Academy Award for playing a self-loathing alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas. And he’s worked with the likes of Martin Scorsese and Spike Jonze in Bringing Out the Dead and Adaptation.
The point is he is not a complete hack, but he gives absolutely no reason here to ever be taken seriously again.
Bangkok Dangerous is possibly the worst movie ever made. With about 15 minutes left, the projector shut off. Apparently it had enough, too. It was turned back on and likely forced at gunpoint to finish showing the movie.
Bangkok Dangerous is the movie you show to someone you loathe but be warned, your eyes may bleed should you join in.
0/5 – I can’t rate it low enough.
This review originally appeared in the September 9 edition of the Carleton FreePress
Righteous Kill ain’t Heat
Jon Avnet’s Righteous Kill pairs two legends of American cinema.
Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are two of the all time greats. They are the film equivalent to Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
But Maris and Mantle didn’t try to play baseball into their 60s. De Niro and Pacino may be playing after their before “best before” date.
The ad campaign for Righteous Kill smartly highlights this legendary pairing and even says “together at last.” But they have been together before.
It’s accurate if Godfather part II isn’t considered a collaboration between the two because they didn’t share any screen time and existed in different eras. But only 13 years ago, in Michael Mann’s epic crime caper Heat, De Niro and Pacino were the focal point.
Still, Heat did everything right. It was long, slow and methodical– but never boring. The cat-and-mouse game between cop Vincent Hannah (Pacino) and career criminal Neil McCauley (De Niro) built to the inevitable Shakespearean-tragedy finish.
McCauley and Hannah were fleshed out like real people. Neither was presented as inherently good or bad, regardless of what side they represented in the cop-and-robbers world. Heat took a tired old premise and made it fresh again.
Studios were likely hoping Righteous Kill would do the same.
It didn’t quite happen.
The comparisons to Heat are inevitable, and using such a wonderful film as a comparison makes it a tough sell for the new guy in town. It could have worked as a police procedural, but the elements of a twist are in place from the very beginning.
Detective Turk (De Niro) is seen–on a grainy video tape–supposedly confessing to string of murders. Then the film plays out from when the killings started.
So why would a filmmaker give away that nugget at the beginning of a film? That’s right, he wouldn’t! Immediately the audience should know that no matter who is guilty it is definitely not the guy confessing at the start of the movie. If it was, we could all go home.
Righteous Kill plods along with rudimentary characters like John Leguizamo and Donnie– “I wish I was Mark”– Wahlberg as rival detectives who, unlike the audience, are fooled into believing Turk is the murderer.
These two cops offer nothing to the story. They muddle the scenery and are supposed to be red herrings – possible suspects who may be revealed later on.
Pacino’s Rooster (nickname) goes along with the two of them as they investigate Turk in a way of proving them wrong. Also along for the ride is Carla Gugino as a forensic officer for the NYPD with a penchant for rough sex with Detective Turk. And to add further conflict, she had dated Leguizamo’s character a few years before.
It’s a painfully obvious film that leads to an inevitable conclusion that can be seen from miles away. But it’s not a terrible movie. Yes it’s unoriginal and an excuse to make De Niro and Pacino look like bad asses instead of geriatrics, but it’s pretty entertaining.
Righteous Kill is the perfect movie to catch on late night cable when you have nothing to do. Flipping through the channels and you see De Niro kicking 50 Cent in the gut while he’s handcuffed. That alone is worth price of admission.
For those who haven’t seen Heat, Righteous Kill still won’t stand out as a great film but it won’t seem half bad either if you’re a fan of cop movies. But it was done much better 13 years ago.
Every character in Heat mattered and was given personality and reason for their choices, good or bad. The reasoning behind Righteous Kill comes off as a re-hash of Travis Bickle’s plans to rid the street of scum in Taxi Driver – another superior De Niro flick.
In the past De Niro and Pacino have made films with Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Mann, John Frankenheimer and Quentin Tarantino. Now they’re slumming with Jon Avnet, who hasn’t proven himself. His film 88 Minutes has been universally panned. When the critic quote on the poster calls it a “guilty pleasure” it gives you the idea that it’s not a very good film.
Righteous Kill is never boring but it isn’t a memorable trip to the cinema either. These legends are past their glory days but they’re not to be counted out just yet. Check the resumes. They had clout–and could easily find it again.
2/5 – It ain’t Heat, but it’s not Bangkok Dangerous either.
This review originally appeared in the September 19 edition of the Carleton FreePress
