Cynical Cinema

I’m a big fan of Cillian Murphy’s.  Since the excellent 28 Days Later, he hasn’t made a single bad movie.  Lucy Liu, on the other hand, has starred in exactly two good movies in her life.  Shanghai Noon and Kill Bill.  Well, make that three good movies.  Because Watching The Detectives is pretty good.  Murphy and Liu have terrific chemistry together, and the script is clever and quick without being overly nerdy.  And this is the type of movie that could easily become terribly nerdy.  You see, it’s about a movie nerd.  And movies about movie nerds tend to be made BY movie nerds, and they become so self-referential and obscure that they can be enjoyed only by OTHER movie nerds.  But thankfully, Watching The Detectives manages to be accessible to regular people as well!

Watching The Detectives, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the works of Elvis Costello, is a song about a woman who, well, watches detectives.  She’s a femme fatale who enjoys messing with people, causing mayhem and then sitting back and watching the results.  “She’s filing her nails as they’re dragging the lake”.  We think at first that it is Cillian Murphy who is “watching the detectives” in this movie.  He is a movie nerd, running a local video store (much like the store in Be Kind Rewind, in that it specializes in hard-to find VHS tapes).  He is watching the world go by, without getting actually involved.  He spends all his time with movies.

Then Lucy Liu blows into his life, turning it upside down.  Her charismatic and on-the-edge craziness snap him out of his daydream of a life, and soon he finds himself breaking into other video stores, facing down the FBI in his back room, and getting into crazier and crazier adventures.  And after a while, we learn that it isn’t Murphy who’s “watching the detectives”, it’s actually Lucy Liu who is the character from the song.  And as Murphy falls for her more and more, and his life spirals more and more out of control, we begin to question her motives, much like we would if we were watching a film noir, like the type Murphy is so obviously into.  But as the movie gets sillier and sillier, it remains very watchable and interesting, thanks mostly to the performances of Murphy and Liu.  Watching The Detectives came out August 5th from Peace Arch Entertainment.

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley is one of the most unfortunately-named movies in recent memory.  It conveys some sort of sweeping romantic epic that will likely involve intricate costumes and poems read to a lady from over a hedge of some kind.  And, in a way, it actually is.  But it’s an epic love affair between Irishmen and their country.  It’s actually the story of the beginnings of the IRA, as the British government holds Ireland in a grip of terror.  The British soldiers are beating Irish citizens, enforcing apartheid-type laws against the citizens of the country.  And the Irish have had enough.  They form a group to fight back against the British military. 

Cillian Murphy is terrific as Damien O’Donovan, a doctor who gets caught up in the resistance along with his brother Teddy, the de-facto leader of the resistance movement.  Orla Fitzgerald is wonderful as Damien’s love interest, and the rest of the cast is fantastic as well.  The movie is long - more than two hours - but it has a lot of story to tell.  The Irish resistance finds guns and weapons to drive out the British, but once they start becoming successful, they begin fighting amongst themselves, over political and territorial issues.  The IRA is split into two basic factions, the one that is willing to accept a compromise with the British and become a free state of the British Empire, and the one that will accept nothing less than total freedom from Great Britain.

The tension between the brothers, the warring factions, the passion of the resistance fighters and the palpable love of their country are all themes and moments that are expertly handled by the director, Ken Loach.  As the movie draws to an end, we see the issues that not only divided the IRA at the beginning, but also divided the country itself.  A fascinating and powerful look at the nascent years of one of the most famous (and infamous) fighting forces in the world, as well as the politics that divided Ireland, The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an epic, beautifully filmed tale of struggle, triumph and tragedy.

As a film nerd, there are certain movies people assume I have seen. They will quote these movies to me as though I will automatically know what they are talking about. “You know the guy who plays Bob Slydell in Office Space”…or “remember that scene in Pink Flamingos…” and nine times out of ten, I have indeed seen the movie. However, I am still missing out on a few. One of those films is Trainspotting. Oh, I have had opportunities. In fact, I actually own a copy, but ever since I got it I just haven’t had a chance to watch it, or haven’t been in a mood to see it. And I know I should, and I know it will be good, and I love the rest of Danny Boyle’s stuff. He is the same guy who directed 28 Days Later, one of the most original zombie movies in twenty years, and now Sunshine, a movie I can describe only as breathtaking. It is available on Blu-Ray, and although I just watched it on regular DVD, I must say that if ever a film was created for Blu-Ray and HD, it is Sunshine (or maybe that Planet Earth box set).

As I watched Sunshine, two movies came almost immediately to mind. Event Horizon (although Sunshine was much better) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (although Sunshine wasn’t nearly that good). The main reason was that the first half plays very close to 2001. The talking computer that guides the ship, the incredible visuals of outer space, and the tense moments on spacewalks outside the ship itself. Then there is a moment that ranks up there with that “open the pod bay doors, HAL” moment in 2001. “There is enough oxygen on the ship for four people, right?” I won’t explain it. Those of you who have seen the movie will understand, those of you who have not ought to see the film. From that turning point on, the end of the film is very reminiscent of Event Horizon, again because of the visuals and because of the chaotic way in which it is filmed.

This is the only truly weak point of Sunshine, the chaotic nature of the ending. It is not bizarre in the same way the ending to, say, a Bergman film is bizarre. There IS a conclusion, it DOES make some sort of sense, but it is not that well thought out. If you pay close attention, and watch a few more times, then you end up with more questions than you had before. If you don’t pay close attention, and you just let the visuals overwhelm you until the credits roll, you won’t understand what’s happening at all. But this is a minor quibble, since the visuals are the main reason to watch. Cillian Murphy is terrific, as usual. He and Danny Boyle are one of those actor-director duos who are springing up everywhere now. (Cronenberg and Mortensen, Tarantino and Thurman, Lynch and Dern, Burton and Depp, etc…) And they do their best work together.

For a list of the best actor-director tandems of all time, check out this blog, I think it’s pretty good:
http://www.bestweekever.tv/2007/11/02/top-10-actor-director-tandems-in-movie-history/

Sunshine is a brilliant movie, and if you don’t mind a little bit of abstract art, you will thoroughly enjoy it. And if you have Blu-Ray, that also is a must when you’re renting.