The Dark Knight Rises

Posted on July 18, 2012 at 11:38 am

There’s a reason you never hear about “your friendly neighborhood Batman.” Spidey may have some angst and guilt and abandonment issues but he is downright sunny-natured compared to the brooding soul of Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), holed up in Wayne Manor with only his loyal manservant Alfred (Michael Caine) and his tortured memories. At the end of the second chapter of director and co-writer Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, Wayne decided it would be better for the citizens of Gotham to believe that Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) died a hero than to tell them to truth about the descent of a once-honorable man into madness and vigilantism. So everyone thinks that Batman is the villain who killed Dent instead of the hero who saved the city and Wayne is refusing to see anyone.

In Dent’s memory, legislation has been passed to keep dangerous criminals imprisoned and the crime rate is down so low that a policeman jokes they may be reduced to chasing people down for overdue library books. But everyone in this story is tortured by secrets and shame, even Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldham), who carries in his breast pocket a speech setting the record straight but does not have the nerve to deliver it. There is the lissome but light-fingered catering assistant who turns out to be the notorious Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway, rocking the leather catsuit). And there is Bane (Tom Hardy), a terrorist who shows his contempt for humanity by cynically couching his atrocities in the idealistic vocabulary of social justice, trashing spirits as he trashes the concrete and social structures of the community.

It is overlong at two hours and 40 minutes but the action scenes are superbly staged, from the audacious plane-to-plane maneuver at the very beginning to the literally earthshaking attack on the city. The “pod” motorcycle chases are sensational, especially with Hathaway at the helm. She is never referred to as Catwoman, by the way, but when her goggles are up on her head, they amusingly evoke cat’s ears. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a standout as a perceptive young detective who understands Wayne too well. Hardy does his best to overcome the daunting limitations of the masked role, acting with his eyes and body language, but the weirdly disembodied voice is unconnected to the action and at times seems like a bad dub job in a cheesy karate film. Bale’s performance in this role (or, I should say, these roles) has always seemed thin to me, but fellow Oscar-winners Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, and Michael Caine add some heft, especially Caine’s devoted Alfred, and it is good to see Tom Conti and Juno Temple in small but important roles.

The “Dark Knight Rises” title applies equally to both hero and villain in this story. This is like a chess game where all the pieces are black. Everyone has masks. Everyone has scars and a soul corrupted by a bitter stew of anger, fear, betrayal, abandonment, and isolation. Wayne says more than once he wears a mask to protect those he cares about, but he wears it to keep himself from getting too close to them, too. Nolan continues his exploration of duality and untrustworthy narrators (though one logical inconsistency inadvertently telegraphs a plot twist). Even the WMD at the heart of the action was originally designed for a benign, even heroic, purpose. This is a thoughtful, ambitious story that explores the metaphor and heightened reality of the superhero genre to illuminate the fears and secrets — and potential for heroism and yearning for a clean slate — we all share.

Parents should know that this film has extended comic book-style action, peril, and violence, many characters injured and killed, torture, hostages, references to sad loss of parents, brief mild language, non-explicit sexual situation

Family discussion: Almost everyone in this movie has secrets and conflicts — how many can you identify? Was Bruce Wayne right in thinking the risks of the energy technology were greater than the benefits? How are Bane and Batman alike?

If you like this, try: the Frank Miller “Dark Knight” comic books and the other “Dark Knight” movies

‘The Fighter’s’ Micky Ward and Dickie Eklund — The Real Story

Posted on December 8, 2010 at 3:59 pm

One of the year’s best films is “The Fighter,” with Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale as boxing brothers Micky Ward and Dickie Eklund and Melissa Leo as their mother, Alice. Micky and Dickie (who asked that his name be spelled “Dicky” in the movie, so he could match his brother) grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, a once-thriving mill town that fell on hard times when the textile business moved to the South. Dickie became a boxer who was referred to as “The Pride of Lowell.” He was Micky’s hero. But by the time Micky, the son of Alice’s second husband, was old enough to box, Dickie was a crack addict. The man who once knocked down boxing great Sugar Ray Leonard was featured in an HBO documentary called High on Crack Street. The movie is the story of the conflicts Micky faced as he had to decide whether to go with an outside manager who would pay him for training and take him away from Lowell or stay with his family, using Alice as his manager and Dickie as his trainer.

This project was a long-time dream for Mark Wahlberg, and he and director David O. Russell made sure that some of the details were authentic. The gym in the film is not a movie set; it is the real place where Ward trained and still trains. One of his cornermen, a police officer named Mickey O’Keefe, is played in the film by O’Keefe himself.

But, as with any feature film, there is some dramatic license in the characters and events in order to turn the messiness of real life into a story that can fit into two hours. For more information about the real story, check out The Hard Life and Times of Micky Ward and “Fighter” More Fiction Than Fact. Here’s a look at the real Micky and Dickie.

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The Real Story

Public Enemies

Posted on December 8, 2009 at 8:00 am

Back before the days when trashy faux celebrities from tawdry reality shows merited magazine covers and “gangsta” rappers postured and pretended to be killers, there was once a romanticized fascination with actual killers with names like “Baby Face” and “Pretty Boy.”

John Dillinger needed no infantalized nickname. He robbed at least 24 banks and killed several people, including police officers. But he had a rakish audacity and an innate populism that endeared him to people during the depths of the Depression. “I’m not here for your money,” he says to one bank customer who had the bad luck to be there during a robbery. “I’m here for the bank’s money.”

Dillinger became the most wanted man in America by law enforcement authorities and helped inspire the enactment of new federal laws and increases in budget and authority for the FBI. His story, ended when he was gunned down by the FBI coming out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, has been the subject of many books and movies, and now this latest starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, and directed by Michael Mann (“Miami Vice,” “Collateral”).

In this diligent but somehow chilly and uninvolving retelling of the story the details seems right and Depp delivers a performance of enormous depth, maturity, and appeal. Bale, however, is a cipher as Pervis, leaving the story unbalanced.

It’s a forest and trees problem. The details are all careful and often arresting, but there’s no real sense of what the movie’s overall story is or why it is being told. We know how it will end, indeed we are there to see the big shootout, but that removes much of the suspense. Depp is fascinating as always but Dillinger himself is not all that interesting. Is he a sociopath? Is it desperation or rebellion? The focus on just the last portion of his short life does not give us enough of a clue. When he has the inevitable crime movie scene with Dillinger and his devoted girlfriend (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as a Depression-era Bess the landlord’s daughter), dreaming of escaping to a peaceful life, it is unconnected to anything about him we have seen before. What do we learn from this violent man’s devotion to one woman? He is impulsive but cagey, shrewd about today but not about next week, cocky but fatalistic.

And the movie fails to connect in any meaningful way to the parallels in today’s world. It’s a hat movie, pretty good but nothing more.

Once again, we now have a population that might secretly side with someone who robs banks, feeling that it is a just reversal of what the banks have done to us. But these days, we don’t glamorize criminals any more. We’re too busy keeping up with Jon and Kate.

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Based on a book Biography Crime Drama

Terminator: Salvation

Posted on December 1, 2009 at 8:00 am

How can you have a war between humans and machines when the line between them is hard to find?

In the first three Terminator movies, cyborgs from the future were sent back in time to prevent future leader of the resistance John Connor from being born and then from surviving. But in the fourth installment, set in a bleak, apocalyptic landscape of bleached-out rubble and belching fires (but apparently excellent dental care), the time that was foretold has arrived. The Skynet computer network has achieved self-awareness and now sees humans as a threat to its continued existence.

Connor (now played by Christian Bale) is a charismatic rebel who does not work well with the chain of command. He knows that his future will require him to send a man named Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) back in time to protect a young waitress named Sarah Connor, who will become his mother, from the Terminator sent to kill her. He knows that Reese, now a teenager, must not just rescue Sarah; he will fall in love with her and become John’s father. A bit of an ontological paradox, but if we were going to worry about that, we’d never get to the explosions and shoot-outs, so on we go.

The machines’ “awareness” and instinct for independence achieves a kind of humanity as the humans’ ruthlessness and desperation makes them increasingly mechanistic. Life is Hobbsian, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The people and the machines are more alike than different — they can think of little but self-preservation, and humanity is defined not by how something or someone is created but by the capacity to sacrifice for others.

It does not live up to the first two films, which had astonishing special effects, arresting characters, and some emotional resonance. But it does have some enormously cool machines (what I would like to see is these guys up against the Transformers, now that would be a movie!), and an Australian actor named Sam Worthington, an enormously magnetic performer who will also be featured in the upcoming “Avatar” movie (coincidentally directed by James Cameron, who directed the first two “Terminator” films). Worthington is electrifying. He plays Marcus, a character who raises questions about what it means to be human but provides a definitive answer about what it means to be a star.

Chris Brown and Michael Phelps — What Do We Tell Kids?

Posted on February 9, 2009 at 3:42 pm

This has been something of a bad boy week. A-Rod confessed to steroid use. “Dark Knight” star Christian Bale was taped when he erupted into a furious and very profane rage at a technician on his set. A photograph of Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps puffing marijuana at a party was published in England. And assault allegations against pop star Chris Brown have already led to suspension of his ad campaign with Wrigley, though so far no charges have been filed.
This is particularly troubling in the case of Phelps (age 23) and Brown (age 19) because they have been role models for many young fans who may be disappointed and confused. It is a good chance for a family discussion of consequences — reputational and financial — for foolish choices. The Phelps photograph was apparently taken with a cell phone. Parents must make it clear to teenagers that in a world of omnipresent capacity for taking pictures and videos and instantly making them available via the internet, even if the subject is not a celebrity. Even these very young performers have devoted a great deal of time to building careers that rest as much on their reputations for honesty, dedication, and professionalism as on their talent. A momentary bad judgment has put all of that at risk. When our generation was in school, a threat was having some infraction on our “permanent record.” In today’s world, everything goes on the permanent record. Even a photograph removed from Facebook or Myspace lives on forever, to be accessed by potential employers, admissions directors, and friends. This is a good time to talk with them about the choices they make in posting photographs of others as well as those taken of them.
It is also a good time to talk about apologies. Bale said nothing for four days and then impulsively called into a radio station that had been making fun of him. While he apologized unreservedly, he said “I regret it. I ask everybody to sit down and ask themselves if they have ever had a bad day and lost their temper and really regretted it immensely.” That “bad day” reference sounds too much like an excuse; I guarantee the person who was having the bad day in that situation was the technician on the other end of the tirade. A-Rod tried the same “different era” excuse that Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain used to explain his $1.2 million office decorating expenses.
Phelps’ apology was prompt and unequivocal. He is suspended for three months from competing but his endorsement contracts seem to be staying with him. Brown has not yet made a statement. This is a good opportunity to talk to kids about what people do to acknowledge and rectify mistakes and about how loyal friends and fans can still support people even if they’re not perfect. And it is a good opportunity to let them know that however they feel — disappointed or supportive or both — that is legitimate and understandable.