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Title: Batman Begins |
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Release Date: 2005 |
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Nationality and Language: USA/English |
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Running time: 140 min |
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Distributor and Production Company: |
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Director; Writer: Christopher Nolan |
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Producer: |
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Cast: |
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Technical: full widescreen |
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Relevance to DOASKDOTELL site: heroes |
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Batman Begins (2005,
Warner Bros./DC Comics, dir. Christopher Nolan, 140 min, PG-13) was
previewed with a ten-minute trailer the last night of the
Smallville 2004-2005 season. I
have long suggested that TheWB convert
Smallville to a movie franchise for The Dark Knight (2008, Warner Bros. / Legendary / DC Comics, dir. Christopher Nolan, 152 min, PG-13) is a main-course sequel. Christian Bale, now ripened, is Wayne, and the late Heath Ledger is the playing card Joker, sometimes in drag, and Aaron Eckhardt as the two-face DA gets his face split, literally. The script rather compares the Joker's rants to those of Osama bin Laden. Blogger review.
Sky High (2005, Touchstone/Walt Disney/Buena Vista, dir. Mike
Mitchell, PG, 102 min) is a spectacular full widescreen fantasy about
Super Kids, who are indeed becoming a kind of staple now. We live in a
world where super parents, according to the laws of
Mendelian genetics, have certain mathematical probabilities of
having super kids. Well, the kids are bussed to a private school in the
sky (the bus flies), where there is a kind of high-tech
Hogarts school for the gifted. Well, there
is social Darwinism at work right away, as the Kids are divided into
Super Heroes and, get this, Hero Support (aka
Sidekicks) depending on whether they have Powers. (Remember that
Smallville episode where When I was in kindergarten, the teacher divided us into “brownies and elves.” I was a brownie, so I know the feeling of being in the subordinate part of the hierarchy. This kind of attitude goes back to the ideas of British philosopher Herbert Spencer (not just Charles Darwin). The Super Kids in the more “dramatic” shows (like Clark, Lana, Chloe, Ephram, Seth, Shawn, Justin, Bobby, Martin) seem more compelling to me.
Nicholas
Nickleby: At the end of 2002, The tender bond between Nickleby and Smike as they go on their adventures becomes the locus of the story., Smike is partially crippled, and this may be due to his mistreatment by Squeers (who has almost worked him to death as “compensation” for taking care of him). The two characters get theater jobs acting in Romeo and Juliet, where Smike will play a sidekick and deliver a one-liner. But quickly Nicholas gets drawn back into family business and intrigues, which these 19th Century English novels are so good at conjuring up. Smike seems to get stronger and more self-confident with his new freedom and loving care from Nicholas, before a tragedy comes, and it seems as though he really wants to wear the comedy ring. Some critics are saying that Hunnam’s delivery is a bit bland and monochromatic, a foil for introducing all the other rich characters (many of them “bad” but still all too human), as Hunnam reinforces his own humanity by putting family first or at least creating a new one. That is, the film would be more lively with a bit of “Bad Clark is back!” But I found him to be more a down-to-earth version of a young male character role model that we used to see only in the comics.
Oliver Twist
(2005, TriStar/Sony Classics/RP, dir. Roman
Polanski, 140 min, PG-13) is a very artsy period rendition of Charles
Dicken’s most famous novel. Filled with
parallels to Dickens’s own life and other meanings, its most important
performances are those of Barney Clark as the 10-year-old orphan Oliver
Twist, and Ben Kingsley as Fagin, who runs the household of runaway boys
as pickpockets (and as an unfortunate parody of the Jewish businessman).
It’s a bit hard to get in to because the story and speech seem archaic,
something English literature teachers love, or perhaps high school
teachers who would hand out video work sheets for this movie (though it
is too long for one class, even extended)—and there is a great deal of
detail to pick up in this film. The most grotesque villain is Sykes
(Jamie Foreman) who hangs himself accidentally at the end, with the help
of his vicious white dog, who literally turns him in. The film contains
rather flat-looking matte paintings of old Hero; House of Flying Daggers; Curse of the Golden Flower: moved
Oliver!
(1968, Another literary paradigm that is a bit parallel to
Harry Potter is Lemony Snicket and the
real-life author Daniel Handler (his “alter ego”). The movie is
Lemony
Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
(Paramount/Nickelodeon/Dreamworks,
PG, 97 min, dir. Brad Silberling). (The
component books are “The Bad Beginning,” “The Reptile Room,” and “The
Wide Window,” not to be confused with Secret Window. The
screenplay adaptation was finished by Robert Gordon. First, the film
evokes a parallel universe look of matte painting with steam trains and
Nash-like sedans with tape decks, as well as genuine fantasyland
(“Baltimore Is Missing” very much in this film)—so why isn’t it in full
2.3:1 Widescreen? Well, most kids’ movies aren’t, and when I saw it at a
Regal Cinema (on the supersized screen) the
holiday audience was filled with grade schoolers.
But the tale of three orphaned children, the
Baudelaires, escaping the evil guardian Count
Olaf (Jim Carrey – “Hello! Hello! Hello!” –
sorry, Jim Carrey doesn’t look like himself in this movie, and he
doesn’t get to show his butt). Now Olaf is
after their parents’ money, and he will even marry 14-year-old Violet
Baudelaire (Emily Browning) in a play to get at it. (This, in these days
of debating family values, whether a “marriage” like that stands up (and
this is a straight marriage) is a good one for the lawyers.) Now, this
whole fantasy works because 14-year-old actor Liam Aiken (no relation
apparently to Clay Aiken) carries the whole story. He is like a
miniature superman, without the gee-whiz stuff, and it seems to come out
of ethical or moral power. We can only assume that
Silberling has studied the WB Smallville
episodes and realized how much better Everyman Jude Law plays Lemony Snicket (voice), reading; Meryl Streep is Aunt Josephine, and Dustin Hoffman is uncredited as the critic. On An animated version of
Hercules (1998, Walt Disney, dir. Rom Clements and John
Musker, 02 min) makes Hercules more like a
A 2005 film that seems to articulate “Smallville”
concepts in the movies is the Marvel comics film
Fantastic Four
(Fantastic 4) (20th Century Fox, dir. Tim Story, story by
Mark Frost and Michael France, 106 min, PG-13). The concept is simple.
Four normal humans make a space shuttle voyage to measure a solar storm.
It zaps them early on, and when they come back to earth they all have
“powers.” Well, sort of. Let’s back up a minute. First of all, the four
report to a mad scientist Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), who wants to
use the experiment to get powers himself. He partially “succeeds,”
his body becoming “infected” and gradually become infiltrated by
streaking metalloid tumors. (Folks, get out your chemistry texts.) Mr.
McMahon was a law student who had always wanted to get into acting, and
got a big chance with this move. In a sense, his career parallels that
of my character “Tobey” in a couple of my
screen plays. But actually, Reed Richards, the good scientist from MIT
and nominally the informal technical team leader of the group is
actually the “Tobey” character in the movie.
Played by Welsh actor Ioan
Gruffudd, he looks at bit over-fashioned (Fab
5, maybe), but he has a dedicated girl friend Sue Storm (Jessica Alba).
Now Reed will become Mr. Fantastic, as he can stretch any part of his
body to infinity. In a couple scenes, the cinematography shows his light
arm hair moving out with the stretch, as if his body still has finite
mass and size. The stretching becomes an exercise in algebraic topology,
and homology. Now Sue becomes the Invisible Woman, and is a bit like the
character Sheila (Tobey’s girl friend in my
screenplays), to the point that Reed will propose to her at the end.
Then there is Michael Chiklis, a balding,
hairy middle aged character whose body suddenly turns to stone, as The
Thing. It is as if he suddenly had neurofibromatosis. Chris Evans (now
24, from Cellular) plays Sue’s brother
Johnny. Chris, with youthful, perfect face but hairy chest and limbs
(there is one particularly provocative pose where he is in his skivvies
and looks like a “real” male model – yes, Chris looks Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007, 20th Century Fox, dir. Tim Story, 90 min, PG, Canada), that is, FF II, is a real movieated Marvel comic book. There is this galactic cloud monster (I personally like the idea of using a brown dwarf as the "monster") that can devour planets, with a couple of apprentices, one who looks like Darth Vader, and then the Silver Surfer, who glides through space like a kid on a sidewalk surfboard. His body is surfaced "thmooth" with aluminum paint, it seems. The Human Torch has problems with accidental power exchanges with the other teammates. But Chris Evans keeps his disco-pretty face and hairy chest, totally impervious to fire. There's some pretty fantastic shots of the Thames area in London (it gets drained by one of the Surfer's sinkholes) and Shanghai. In the end, Sue and Reed have a republican marriage, with the most abbreviated of "I do" ceremonies. The Torch will stay free and single. This movie is not so much about heroes as it is about extreme sports. Shaun White ought to appear. X-Men (2000, dir. Bryan Singer);
X2: X-Men United (2003, ditto) X-Men: The Last
Stand (2006, all films 20th Century Fox, dir. Brett
Ratner (“X3”)
Franchise, based on Marvel Comics and characters. I saw the first
two of these films when they came out and they all deal with new mutants
coming to their Academy and with miscreant mutants, so it’s more
productive to focus on the most recent film, with a similar story, to
make the basic points. Patrick Stewart, the bald British actor whom I
think could play me, is the good Professor Xavier, who may come to his
demise in this movie; Ian McKellan plays
Magneto, and reassures us that senior citizens can have super powers (he
seems a bit like Teabring in
Da Vinci Code).
Hugh Jackman is the hirsute Wolverine, and
James Marsden is Cyclops, who will come to
another demise at the hand of Ororo (Halle
Berry) at what looks like a lake in the Cascade Range that I may have
visited (along US 2 in Washington) or it may be a similar location in
British Columbia. But all of this skims across the obvious political
point: the Mutants are “different” and they are perceived as threats to
normal people. Read that, if you will, “homosexuals,” at least in the
mentality of the 50s, and especially take into consideration arguments
about homosexuality and biology. The pretext here offers another
opportunity, for all the major mutants to have heterosexual love lives
whenever they want to and propagate “their own kind.” So perhaps they
are even a paradigm for the Jews in Of course, however, the mutants really are different, and have physical powers that normal people don’t have. The powers are extreme, but that is beside another political point: that Earth is very lucky that homo sapiens are so genetically coherent (and that is probably because of a few spectacular volcanic eruptions aeons ago). All of this brings up still another point: this is a very safe kind of entertainment to budget and make, however much it costs. There is stylized violence and assassination, but it could not possibly be replicated. The action sequences, however entertaining, are totally meaningless in terms of anything that can really happen, so there is almost no possibility of anything is enticed. In my own screenwriting attempts, I stage scenarios, some of them dangerous and objectionable to some, that are frightening because, in general, they could really happen, although improbably. That’s a lot more interesting to me, and more dangerous. A few of the younger kids, Iceman (Shawn
Ashmore), flying angel Warren (Ben Foster)
and John Allerdyce/Pyro (“Tadpole” Aaron
Stanford) act their roles as convincing characters, reminding us more of
the atmosphere created by programs like
Smallville. (Although Foster and Stanford look a lot alike
here,) There are discussions of the moral responsibilities of using
one’s gifts (much like Superman Returns (2006, Warner Brothers/Bad Hat/Legendary/DC Comics, dir. Bryan Singer, 154 min, PG-13). Okay, I’m cheating by putting the entry on this file a bit early, and I’ll try to see in June 28. Brandon Routh, who
plays Clark, Kevin Spacey, who plays Lex
Luthor (and shaved his head for the role),
and Bryan Singer, who at 40 looks more like he is 20, appeared on CNN
“Larry King Live” June 23. Again, it raises the question of what an indie Smallville movie would look like. But let the blockbuster arrive. The film opens with Lex
Luthor at his mother’s bedside,
force-signing her will as she takes her last breath. (Lex will not allow
a "John Knowles" "Reading of the Will.") Lex
takes it all. Then we cover the ground quickly. We see a flashback
reprise of teenage Clark (Stephan Bender), learning to fly in Australian
( Soon we learn Lex’s
real plan, it to grow another continent in the Here is the place to mention the personal stuff.
His beloved was That all brings us to the style of the movie, which
is comic-book, of course, and “safe” socially. The first couple of
seasons of “Smallville” often developed the
dramatic possibilities of a developmentally advanced but still teenage My own screenplay and novel experiments play with the borderline sci-fi idea. I liked to have a few “good” characters (all characters are my own), with one or two of them having potentially supernatural abilities, against a background of social and political issues brewing. In one case, I have the theme of fighting terrorism and rebuilding the WTC as events unfold; in another I have my own idea of “close encounters” where one character may have the opportunity to become an angel or to marry and have a “normal family life,” with a background political crisis created by an epidemic that might have an extraterrestrial origin. But rather than a lot of fast-motion activity, I like to probe the dramatic (and sometimes political, social and moral) possibilities, and put characters together in various combinations in a train of scenes, almost as in a stage play. That’s more like the indie market than a film like this. (As I say, the original Smallville concept, if a movie, would fit the “Warner Independent Pictures” concept well.) I don’t have “villains” like
Lex, though. Instead I have non-competitive people who stumble
into trouble by self-indulgence while refusing conventional
socialization when adaptive living must come before creativity. Pay your
dues! Networks report that the new Superman series
has to leave out “American values” in its “truth and justice” platitudes
and epigrams, to sell around the world. I’d like to see the majors be
able to give this kind of story real substance. Nevertheless, WB proudly
displays its The original Superman movie franchise comprised: Superman (1978, Warner Bros., dir.
Richard Donner) starts with Christopher
Reeve as the adult Man of Steel and Jeff East as the teenage Superman II (1980, Warner Bros., dir. Richard Lester) continues the saga as three villains come back from the remnants of Krypton. Superman III (1983, Warner Bros., dir.
Richard Lester) has kryptonite splitting
Superman IV (1987, Warner Bros. Sidney J. Furie) has Lex Luthor invention, a Terminator-like “gray” called Nuclear Man There was also a UK TV syndication Lois &
Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993, Hollywoodland
(2006, Focus/Miramax, dir. Allen Coulter, wr.
Paul Berbaum, 126 min, R). Or call it
Tinseltown. Disney’s restructured Miramax
was a production company for this noir period piece mystery; shot flat
with a lot of close-ups, it has the air of Hitchcock. And there is
murder. In the 1950s, TV’s Superman actor George
Reeves (Ben Affleck) died in his bedroom of a single gunshot room. The
LAPD closed the case quickly. Reeves’s
mother hires agile private detective Louis Simo
(Adrien Brody) at $50 a day to investigate
the death. The movie is layered, and unfolds in time slices, with many
retrospects and some replays of the shooting
under different theories. In that sense, the movie is a film noir- like
Rashomon. There are the usual suspects, with
one of the most compelling being mistress Toni
Mannix (Diane Lane), wife of an Brody is at once ascetic and sumptuous, a lean little man that you admire. His surface animal “manliness” is back to some extent, compared to how he was made up for King Kong. Affleck, on the other hand, looks like an over-the-hill star, his face cracking, his hairline starting to widow, his body mushy in the middle, looking thick even when he puts on the Superman suit for black-and-white TV. (A Tom Welling or Brandon Routh, he is not in this film.) He gets a shot of the S in color, before the show is canceled, and he wants to become a director in New York. Why isn’t playing a comic book hero enough for a life, even in the late innings? Because now he is no hero. There are interesting replays of the 50s TV series, and even a preview of From Here to Eternity, with Affleck dubbed in. Look, Up in the Sky: The Amazing Story of
Superman (2006, Warner Independent Pictures/TheWB/DC
Comics/Bad Hat Harry, dir. Kevin Burns, 120 min,
sug. PG) is a documentary of the Superman franchise, starting
with the comic book series invented by two young men in Cleveland in the
30s, through the movies and TV series in the 50s with George Reeves, to
the main four-film franchise (and also Superboy),
eventually leading to the remake Superman Returns in 2006. The main
movie sequence in the 70s depicted Krypton as a kind of Triton, but
Smallville and Metropolis were always the
places on earth. The Smallville
series was a tremendous hit as it came out after 9/11, and presented The Incredibles (2004, Walt Disney/Pixar, dir. Brad Bird, 115 min, PG). This movie was the subject of a recent sermon, “do we need saviors?” In animation, even with the lifelike Pixar style and Cinemascope, the characters are not as convincing as they are in some of the movies above or in some similar television series discussed. Yet, the movie raises a surprising list of issues as it traverses its plot, in however stylized a fashion. Bob and Helen Parr get moved around in witness protection programs after saving the world. Bob tries to live a normal suburban family life as an insurance claims adjuster (I think loss prevention specialist would have been more interesting). His three kids are sky-high, like above, even the youngest, who isn’t even potty trained yet. (Hope he’s not in extended day at school.) But he gets drawn into one more assignment, in which he will be outed. Should be people have to live covert lives in order to protect others? That’s one disturbing question. (The myspace.com controversy today raises questions about amateurs drawing global attention to themselves.) There is one line to the effect if everyone were a hero, then no one would be. At the end, the old nemesis comes back into the city in graphic fashion. Jumper (2008, 20th Century Fox / Regency, dir. Doug Liman, 90 min, PG-13, Canada) Here is another comic book style hero, although I didn't see any mention of comics. Hayden Christiansen plays David Rice, a "Jumper" who has the gift of instant teleportation (not even Clark Kent does that). He first uses it after falling into a frozen pond in Michigan to retrieve a toy that a kid had thrown away. We learn only later that his mother (Diane Lane) had known he was "one of them" at age 5. It seems as though Jumpers are chased by "paladins," of which Roland (Samuel L. Jackson, hair dyed) is one. David is charming and charismatic enough, but he gets started with untraceable bank robbery (but Clark robbed ATM's at the start of Smallville's Season 3); but unlike Clark, Jake 2.0, or Kyle XY or similar heroes (including those in the NBC series), he doesn't seem to care about helping people. Max Thieriot plays David at 15, but one wonders if Hayden really could have played that age; the change is not that great. The movie turns into an exercise in showing off special effects. I suspect there will be a franchise of these movies. Remeber the 1981 saying "she's a looker"? Now it's "He's a jumper." Iron Man (2008, Paramount / Marvel / Lionsgate, dir. Jon Favreau, 126 min, PG-13). Well, Iron Man (along with slightly older actor Robert Dowbey Jr.) has to relinquish his chest hair to exist as a character. That's because some sort of magnetizer and pacemaker is drilled right on to the chakra of his chest, after his body is riddled with shrapnel after an explosion in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban. He we have a curious mixture of comic book and modern politics. Tony Stark (Downey) has inherited and built a defense fortune with the air force, but when he is trapped in an Al Qaeda cave, he has to use a real Mossolov iron foundry to blow himself out into the desert. He soon gets disenchanted with the fact that his weapons can kill our own troops, and concentrates on his man-can-fly armor, that combines Superman with Fantastic 4 firefly. There is a comment that no one can be found in the Tora Bora mountains. I don't believe it. From the postlude after the closing credits, we know there will be Iron Man II soon. Terrence Howard ("Hustle & Flow") is effective as the high-pitched Air Force liaison at parties, and Jeff Bridges is done up baldy as Obadiah. Did anyone notice that Stark is also the name of the alter-ego in Stephen King's "The Dark Half"?
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Related: Harry Potter movies The Dark Half (Smallville, One Tree Hill, The Days, Everwood, Jack and Bobby, Seventh Heaven, The O.C., The 4400, Queer as Folk, Jake 2.0, Blue’s Clues |
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