J.D. Hansel

Upon Further Consideration

Elf Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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People who find out that I dislike Elf tend to assume that I am either a Scrooge or a devil.  The truth is that I am a skeptic.

As I often explain, this means I like reason, logic, the scientific method, asking questions, and staying curious.  What I dislike is the promotion of belief.  When I say belief, in this case, I mean it the way my English 101 professor defined it: something accepted as truth based on faith.  The problem here is that belief and faith are essentially interchangeable terms: it’s hard to define one without the other, and the best way out of this definition cycle is to incorporate terms like conviction or assurance into the cycle, which just widens the circle without breaking it.  This is by design though – the whole point of “believing” is that you don’t have good, logical reasons for your views, but you choose to accept them anyway (generally because they bring a sense of “hope,” as is implied by the excellent definition of faith offered by Hebrews 11:1).  The problem with belief, or at least this kind of belief, is that it discourages questioning and challenging ideas, which makes it the enemy of the skeptic.

This is why I get so annoyed with Hollywood films, and I often use Elf as my primary example of this issue.  In this film, being a bad person is synonymous with being a skeptic, which in this case means believing Santa Claus does not exist.  Becoming a good person, according to logic of Christmas films such as Elf, is directly tied to becoming a believer.  The father exemplifies the Hollywood metamorphosis from bad to good: he starts out heartless, but then he realizes that his family is more important to him than his job, and from there he gets to see some sign that Santa is real (namely, he meets Santa, but seems unsure as to whether or not it’s really him).  He then opens his heart by singing Christmas songs, and then becomes a believer in Santa, and then is finally free to be a happy, loving, and moral person.  Note how singing the Christmas carol, even when one does not believe in the words, serves as a sort of speech act, verbally claiming one’s “faith” until an actual belief develops, which is commonly done when converting to a religion.  In other words, what Elf is promoting is a religious kind of faith in Santa Claus – a belief regardless of belief, in a sense – and it assumes that this belief is tantamount to having a happy spirit.

We have to consider how significant this really is.  Every year, we are indoctrinating children with these ideas, and we are re-training our own adult brains to think in these terms.  We teach our children and ourselves that morality comes with faith.  Even if you don’t accept the moral problem here, at least consider how absurd it is that we want to watch movies that tell us to believe in Santa Claus.  Santa Claus is the one thing in this world that every adult knows about, but doesn’t believe is real, and yet, here we are telling ourselves to pretend it’s real so that we can be good people.  How insane could a culture be?

I should be able to stop here; the case is closed, right?  No, because I now have to address an important objection to my argument: why Elf?  If this problem runs rampant throughout other Hollywood films – particularly Christmas movies – why is it Elf that always works me up?  Why not The Polar Express?

Indeed, The Polar Express is far more evil than Elf, or at least it’s more explicit and extreme in its propagation of the same evils.  The title song is called “Believe” for a reason – that’s the message of nearly every scene in the movie.  Every few minutes, the protagonist is taught not to ask so many questions, and the importance of following one’s heart is drilled into the viewers head more times than I can count.  What hurts me the most is that the unnamed hero really isn’t closed-minded – he’s curious, as is demonstrated by the fact that he’s looked into the question of Santa Claus and collected evidence to inform his views, like a good thinker.  In my opinion, this means he is a very good person at the start of the film – someone we should want to be a leader someday – but it is the girl (the believer) who is told to lead, and the protagonist who is told to believe.  Stories designed to discourage curiosity and questioning, such as many of the fairy tales in the Germanic tradition, have infamously been used as tools to empower dictators, so I cannot help but see The Polar Express as a danger akin to Triumph of the Will.

Yet, there are many good reasons why I harp on Elf more than Polar Express, although the first reason has nothing to do with the contents of either film.  Because people talk about Elf more, they are far more likely to bring up Elf around me, so my rants on this topic are usually sparked by Elf just because folks want to know why I’m not a fan.  As for the film itself, it isn’t a terrible movie, apart from the aforementioned ethical issue.  It begins on the highest note possible, with allusions to classic Christmas specials and old family films, narrated by the brilliant and legendary Bob Newhart.  The problem is that it mostly goes downhill from here, focusing on an annoying protagonist, rehashing the cliches of all the other family comedies of the time period, and forcing the story to work even if it makes little sense.  In short, once Buddy leaves Santa’s Workshop, the next half hour is just Will Ferrell acting like a stupid, awkward man-child, getting cheap laughs from immature behavior like a middle-schooler, and the last half hour is a random about-face to drama with Buddy saving Christmas (as though somehow the movie was about that the whole time).

There’s no convincing me that the third act isn’t a mess.  Santa’s flight problem more or less pops out of nowhere, the father’s change of heart has no setup, and a couple hundred more people singing Christmas songs than usual is weirdly conflated with literal belief in Santa Claus on a massive scale.  I’m particularly confused about how the news network realized that there was even a news story worth covering here since they started the piece with a picture of a man dressed as an elf walking around Central Park, as though that’s newsworthy for New York City.  It’s all very forced and awkward, just like Jovie’s uncomfortably fast integration into Buddy’s whimsical life (it is always the exact moment when Jovie says the word “Papa” at the end when I realize I have just wasted 90 minutes of my life on foolishness).  I don’t demand realism from a film, but I do expect believability – I want the actions of the characters to follow from who the characters are, but this film feels cheesy because the characters sing so the scene can be happy.  The climax is the epitome of cheesy sentimentality, and it makes me see the film as a dumpster-fire of mindless sappiness.

Again, the film starts strong.  The use of the stop-motion characters is brilliant.  The costumes are delightful.  Some of the casting is really smart.  The music, including both score and soundtrack, is the best music of any Christmas production since Muppet Christmas Carol, or perhaps even A Charlie Brown Christmas.  Much of the film’s strength comes from Zooey Deschanel, who is clearly one of the greatest musical talents of our time, and I hope she goes down in history as a music legend.  Some parts make me laugh a little, but this is no Marx Brothers film; it’s a Jon Favreau, which means it has some intelligence behind it and some good personal touches, but it’s not good enough for me to really like it.  At least The Polar Express has Bob Zemeckis at the help and keeps me wanting to see what inventive and whimsical treats are in store if I keep watching, whereas Elf uses up its creativity in the first half and then succumbs to trite “save Christmas” and “restore the family” formulas as it progresses.

In all honesty, though, I don’t like Elf because it’s overplayed and overrated.  If most people felt that the film was only passable, acceptable, tolerable, mediocre, or below-average, I probably wouldn’t care about it much.  Unfortunately, this film is hailed by many as the greatest Christmas film of all time, and it is frequently marathoned on television and shown to children in schools.  Some would say that this is not a good reason to dislike the film, and I would agree with that, if not for the ethical problem.

I tend to think in consequentialist terms, so I look at the effects of an action, choice, or occurrence to determine if it is good or bad.  The Polar Express is not widely celebrated – its reviews were mixed at best – but Elf is a holiday juggernaut.  Children will see Elf, and it will firmly reinforce our poisonous cultural norms surrounding the importance of belief.  Elf may not be the worst propagator of anti-skeptic doctrines, but it is certainly among the worst, and it has the biggest following of devoted disciples.  This is what makes it such a dangerous cultural cancer.  We already have enough people in America who believe in what they hope for with or without evidence: they are called Trump supporters, and the younger voters in his camp grew up with Elf.  People do not learn to be good people from watching Elf; they learn to enjoy formulaic Hollywood films, they learn to accept cheap laughs as good comedy, they learn to quote a narwhal with a funny voice, and they learn that being a skeptic is bad.  Elf may have its clever moments, and I understand its appeal, but it is nonetheless among the worst Christmas presents the world has ever received.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Upon Further Consideration…

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NOTE: This is an amendment to a previous review of the same film.

When I first reviewed this movie, I don’t think I gave it nearly enough credit for how important it is as a film.  In a way, it may be the most important film of 2014.

One reason I feel this way is that it presents a very different kind of comic book movie – one that doesn’t need to be taken seriously the way The Dark Knight does (in fact, its inclusion of Howard the Duck shows just how little it wants to be taken seriously) and that combines many genres.  It proves that a good Marvel comic book movie can also be a very good comedy film, without either genre taking away from the other, thus paving the way to Deadpool.  Its aim is to have a lot of fun exploring a cool, interesting, and fully-developed sci-fi world.  Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, Guardians of the Galaxy is great sci-fi even though it isn’t great science fiction.  By that I mean it doesn’t present viewers with new and interesting concepts that scientists or philosophers may be interested in exploring the way that Jurassic Park, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and Ex Machina do, but it does present viewers with a world in which they’ll want to become fully immersed – we all want to live in that galaxy.  The action sequences are also quite impressive, making Guardians precisely the kind of action movie that I can get behind.

Another reason why Guardians is important is that it uses music differently from other films.  Obviously, most movies today (particularly family films) rely heavily on recognizable pop songs, and it is by no means uncommon for them to be songs from the 1970s – consider how Despicable Me uses “You Should Be Dancing” in its final scene even though the filmmakers had contemporary pop artists at their disposal.  What makes the use of music in Guardians of the Galaxy and its sequel so interesting is that there is never a sense that the music is something added once the scene has already been shot; the songs in these films were famously written into the screenplays and woven into the plot.  This is generally considered a big no-no in Hollywood: every screenwriter who’s made it in the business knows the rule that specific songs are never named in screenplays because it makes the producers, studio heads, directors, readers, etc. think about how much it would cost to buy the rights to those songs.  I think this used to be a bigger issue than it is now because films rely on expensive pop songs more and more, so producers know to put them into the budget, but it can still be difficult to get the rights to specific songs since some artists require a lot of convincing (see this article and read about getting the rights to “Mr. Blue Sky” for Vol. 2).  For this reason it is a very big deal that Gunn has set precedents for successful screenwriters scripting the songs they need to make the scene work best, allowing for more carefully-tailored soundtracks in films to come.

This isn’t the only interesting aspect of Gunn’s use of music in the Guardians films.  The reason why most filmmakers and film studios haven’t seen much of a problem with making music choices an afterthought, I think, comes from the line of thinking that film is a visual medium.  Usually, a film’s score is seen as something meant to enhance what the characters are doing on screen, and this makes sense in the context of film history since silent films were often shown with a live pianist offering an accompaniment.  Disney’s Fantasia, on the other hand, runs contrary to this thinking about film – rather than making the soundtrack subservient to visuals, Disney made a whole movie out of visuals that are subservient to the soundtrack.  I argue that the Guardians movies work in part because the characters are listening to the music as they fight, fly, work, and play, letting the music guide them.  Both the characters in the film and the makers of the film are using their experiences to celebrate the music itself, and the audience is invited to join in that celebration.  This idea that the scene is subservient to the music and that the music itself is sort of the main attraction (almost something to be glorified) is explored most explicitly in the second film, but I’ll explore that more in my separate review dedicated to Vol. 2.

The importance of the Guardians series in terms of its visual/aesthetic contributions to cinema must not be overlooked either.  I’m sure a lot of critics think the main way in which this film is visually impressive is in its use of CGI, with Rocket Raccoon looking remarkably believable in most of his scenes, but I’m more interested in Gunn’s use of color.  Most movies (made for adults) from the past decade or so have had very muted palettes, whereas the color palette of this film is, while too digital to have all the warmth I might like, more vivid and beautiful than that of most contemporary fantasy films.  Most of Disney’s live-action films today look frighteningly cold and lifeless, with the Beauty and the Beast remake resembling the rotting corpse of its animated predecessor, but Guardians isn’t afraid to fill the screen with bright blues and purples, swirling around like a friggin’ van Gogh.  This, I think, is why more films from the past two or three years have started moving away from the gray pseudo-realism that has consumed so much of Hollywood cinema: Gunn tried being colorful and succeeded, so other directors are finally feeling free to use pretty pinks and deep blues again, sometimes openly contrasting them with the look that most films have had as of late.  Between Guardians and La La Land, I might see cinema come alive again within my lifetime, and that’s a very exciting thing.

As important as I believe Guardians is, what I realized when I watched it for my second time is just how much I simply love it as a movie.  I love the characters and the comedy, and I want to spend all the time I can in this world.  I consider the opening titles sequence to Guardians to be one of the best in history because of how joyous it is, and for that matter, there are very few films that manage to be as joyous throughout at Guardians.  Unfortunately, I found myself checking my watch a few times since the film feels rather long, which is something that hasn’t changed since I first saw the film in the theater, but my appreciation for the film still keeps growing anyway.  It’s truly amazing to me that a film this silly, this fun, and this special was made in such a boring time for cinema, and I’ll gladly keep tipping my hat to Perlman and Gunn ‘til my hand falls off.  Sure it has its problems, but it’s a true gem of cinema for which I’m forever grateful.

Metropolis Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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NOTE: This is an amendment to an earlier review of the same film.

When I first watched this movie, it was the Giorgio Moroder version (a soundtrack comprised of ’80s pop that only sometimes fit the scene well).  This is because I had little tolerance for silent cinema at the time, and while I still don’t think I’m very good at watching silent movies, I’m improving.  The main reason why it made sense for me to return to this story is that the version I saw from back in the ’80s was missing so much of the movie – a lot of the film was lost and had yet to be restored.  I didn’t realize that at the time, so I stupidly criticized Lang for the unintelligible plot that the incomplete version had (and felt quite ashamed when I learned within the month or so that followed that I had been so ignorant of such important information).  The current (2010) version is missing only about five minutes, which is why it’s called “The Complete Metropolis” in some editions, and its plot is perfectly understandable and enjoyable.  For this and other reasons, although I’m not changing the four-star rating I gave the film before, I think I appreciate the movie even more than I did years ago.

It is very clear that this is a unique work of art from the very beginning.  The film’s opening – specifically the title card – is in and of itself worthy of praise, and it sets the exciting tone for the epic movie that follows.  The film is structured in three acts, more or less, and the cards that tell us how far we are through the movie help to create the theatrical experience.  The theatrical feeling – that is, the feeling of being at a stage show – makes me wish I could see this in the form of a musical, but I know that it is designed to serve a very different purpose.  Lang is borrowing from theater to appeal to the people who would be too embarrassed to go to a film that didn’t resemble high culture in some way: the upper class.  This project of making cinema something for intelligent and sophisticated audiences was very important to many German filmmakers at the time, and it is apparent in the relentless use of biblical references all throughout the film, even including the obscure Canaanite god “Moloch.”  The protagonist is very much a Christ-like figure, but is also at least as much a Moses (since he is, more or less, the son of Pharaoh).  Nods to the Tower of Babel are also mixed in, with Maria entirely reworking the story to support her thesis – an unsettling use of religion that sort of makes Maria, a very moral character, seem almost like a lying demagogue.

The film has such a strange mix of elements that I love and elements that I find frustratingly disappointing.  The binary between the moral Maria who hasn’t a bad bone in her body (and who seems like she might as well be oblivious to the existence of sex) and the robot Maria who embraces all things sexual and wild is a great setup, but it would have been great for the two of them to have had an encounter.  The protagonist is a fascinating character: he has a number of visions that make him either a madman or a supernatural prophet, and the has his most important vision – a nightmare sequence – after he wakes up, whereas any other film would show him having a nightmare and then waking up.  It is actually this nightmare scene that makes the film work for me; it’s my favorite part of the movie because it builds up to such a satisfying climax of the second act, ending just as perfectly as the second Hunger Games film does.  I can’t help but compare it to the film adaptations of Carrie, which send us into the third act with great anticipation to see how everything’s about to fall to chaos, “B-movie style,” although Lang gives us more hype before act three that makes it all that much better.  The problem is that the third act doesn’t offer quite enough excitement to live up to this hype, instead feeling rather long.  The ending, too, is not as satisfying as it could be, mostly because the message that the film keeps preaching about the heart being a “mediator” isn’t very meaningful (and I think I read somewhere that Lang himself didn’t sincerely believe it).

This issue of the vague thesis brings me to the question of what the heck this movie is supposed to be.  Is it a utopia or a dystopia?  I hear that Hitler loved this movie, but I can’t tell if it promotes fascism, socialism, democracy, or some other form of government entirely.  Somehow this movie is very European and very American.  It may be in black and white, but it is very colorful (although perhaps my memories of the lovely tints in the Moroder version have shaped the way I want to see this version).  I can’t even tell what I’m supposed to think about technology after watching this film.  It almost tries to undercut its every move, and yet it still manages to be a very satisfying experience.  There’s a kind of energy in this film that’s infectious, and it’s the kind of movie that I just want to have on in the background all the time because I enjoy its essence more than anything else about it.  After thinking about all of this, one thing has become more and more clear: this must, indeed, be made into a musical.  Get to it.

The Graduate Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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NOTE: This is an amendment to a previous review of the same film.

I’m a little bit surprised to say that this film is better on its second viewing, but not too surprised.  I think sometimes it helps to “get used to” a film’s essence, or a film’s ending, in order to appreciate the film’s greatness.  The interesting thing about The Graduate is how well it works as both a comedy and a drama.  The tone of the film can be described as such: imagine if a filmmaker told his actors in secret that they were making a comedy film, but told the cinematographer and camera crew that he was trying to make a drama, and then tried to see how long they could make the comedy before anyone figured out it wasn’t a drama.  That’s the feeling of The Graduate, and while other dramedies have often gone for a similar effect, The Graduate is the film that pulls it off, perhaps because of its playful style.  Mike Nichols seems to become the seducer himself, baiting the viewers in with comedy, but manipulating and emasculating them all the while.  Nichols understands that people often laugh when they are vulnerable, and the brilliance of this film is its ability to use the drama to make the audience vulnerable enough for its comedy to be effective.  The drama and the comedy both play on the same discomfort – a fear of a sort of castration – which may make it a great drama for male viewers, but also establishes the film as being almost exclusively for men because of its constant focus on the American male experience.

I’d like to take the time to systematically go through the ways in which the film explores the anxieties of the young American male, but before I get to the sexual side of this issue, I’ll start with the “formal” aspects.  What I mean by “formal” in this case is the use of traditional models of the successful American man to form oneself into this ideal image.  The typical image of the young person of the late 1960s involves a very passionate, driven person who aims to change the world by screaming in the streets while holding a cardboard sign, but this film presents a later view of the essence of the college kid – a  spaced out, zoned-out, dazed haze.  The film tells us that he has been a successful undergrad student with seemingly good grades and a potential future in graduate school, and has also been a track star and was very well-liked in college, yet he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, no satisfaction from what he’s done so far, and is completely lacking in ambition.  Even for someone like me, a very ambitious person with big goals in life and concrete ideas for achievements I’d like to make in my career, this is still relatable because of how difficult it was for me to choose a college, a place to live, and so on.  Mr. Robinson tells Ben that he wishes he could be young again, buying into the idea that “these are the best years of your life” (not the character’s exact words, but similar) and that people in college have a special freedom of choice.  This film shows that notion to be faulty, instead showing how being  in one’s early twenties is a perfect example of the Kierkegaardian idea of being “lost in the infinite” – having too many choices to be able to make a good one.

What makes this matter so stressful is that he must make a choice.  The fact that he has such a bright future ahead of him forces him to live up to the image of the bright future.  The fact that he is smart means he must continue to be smart, and the fact that he is handsome means that he must marry someone beautiful, and the fact that he has studied at a good college means his next college must be better, and the fact that his parents are wealthy means that he must find a great job, and so on and so forth.  When most people think of encouragement and parental pride as something positive, this film’s thesis is that his parents’ bragging not only sets extremely high expectations for him to constantly hope he can attain, but also leaves him out of the process of forming his identity, making it no surprise that he lacks vision and drive.  Every success he has and every compliment he receives becomes another picket in the fence that’s closing the young man into his ever-shrinking pen.  This film, perhaps like The Breakfast Club, tries to recognize the paradox in that what America calls personal growth is actually an experience of personal compression – society squeezing its youth into a narrow mold.  Being the perfect kid is revealed to be both incarcerating and distancing, as one comes to look at oneself as an image formed in the minds of others that is separate from the autonomous self, but has unfortunately replaced the self as the newly formed identity.

After considering how the film has depicted the daily anxieties of the young male, one must then consider how it depicts the nightly anxieties of the young male – the Freudian nightmare.  Everything that Mrs. Robinson does serves to make her absolutely terrifying to the young male viewer.  While I know it’s generally bad form to use the word you in an essay, I must ask you to make this story as personal as possible and put yourself in Ben’s shoes: a woman who looks like your mother and has known you since you were a small child tricks you into going with her into her house, blocks the door so you cannot avoid seeing her naked body, tempts you into an ongoing secret affair with her, makes you look like an unintelligent fool, challenges your experience and ability to perform adequately in sex, ruins your relationship with your newfound love, calls the police on you, convinces everyone that you raped her, sics her husband on you, and finally marries your lover off to another man.  Ben is tricked, trapped, used, patronized, and ultimately framed.  The audience is inclined to celebrate when he still wins the day and gets the girl, but the ending shows that Ben has woken up from his nightmare only to find himself back in the anxiety of his daily life – his lack of identity and future.

The film’s only focus is on intensifying these anxieties, and the film’s strength is creating the feeling that Mrs. Robinson is holding a giant pair of scissors just under the viewer’s balls.  The film obsesses on this theme almost to a fault, as the film is happy to leave plot holes and skip important parts of the story just to get back to the scenes that showcase anxiety.  The film does not show how, why, or when Ben came to love Elaine and find her to be the only person he could talk to, as the movie even goes so far as to cut out the audio in one of their few on-screen moments of romantic conversation, as if to hold up a sign for the audience that the romance is not what the viewer is supposed to care about.  Nichols even went so far as to give the audience no indication of how Ben escapes the police who arrive at Robinsons’ house to arrest him – a scene that one would think is fairly important – and yet he sees no problem in including two musical montage sequences in a row that are nearly identical, seemingly just because they stay on point with his thesis.  His aggressive focus on the male experience can also have the effect of alienating female audiences, since the story does not play to their interests or anxieties as much, and the drama of Elaine’s life (finding out that her ex-boyfriend raped her mother and has now followed her to her college) is almost entirely overlooked.  Still, it uses its topical conservatism to its advantage by making the most of what it does explore, with a visual style that is adamant on making Ben seem as blocked and confined as possible for the majority of the film’s shots.  In a way, however, one would expect the cinematography to focus less on a claustrophobic effect and more on a dizzying effect, since the film’s thesis can be summed up with one great quote from Søren Kierkegaard: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

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Singin’ in the Rain Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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SPOILER ALERT

Anyone familiar with my “Upon Further Consideration…” series knows from the categorization of this article that I have already seen Singin’ in the Rain in the past.  I think this most recent viewing was my third or fourth one, and I enjoyed each and every previous viewing.  I’ve considered the film to be not only a must-see classic, but also one of my favorite films for many years, although in recent years I started to wonder how much of that might me my memory’s exaggeration based on my fondness for the classic musicals I watched with my family as a child.  I remembered that some parts of the movie felt slow or irrelevant, like the scene that presents all of the models in bizarre dresses – which has nothing to do with the story and does not get a laugh.  During this viewing, however, I was not only pleasantly surprised to see that my memories had not done the film justice, but also that this film is actually an outstanding work of absolute genius, with stunning talent and unbelievable near-perfection that frequently left me literally gaping.

Technically, this is not a perfect movie, but like most of the greats, its strength is in making the audience not care about its imperfections.  The film is loaded with musical numbers that contribute little or nothing to the plot and could have been replaced by just about any other song.  Fortunately, these musical numbers are, overall, so impressive and fun and entertaining as spectacles that no one could possibly complain that they interrupt the plot.  I don’t even mind the needless number about the fashion too much.  Even still, the plot doesn’t hold together perfectly.  Towards the end, Lena essentially takes over the studio simply by lying to the press, making the studio head too concerned that their movie will bomb if one of its stars is found to be a phony.  At the film’s closing, however, the studio head randomly decides that it’ll be perfectly okay to reveal Lena to be an untalented sham, which he obviously could have done sooner in a more professional manner.  The trick that the film pulls here is simply a bit of misdirection – they pull the viewer’s attention to the romantic sub-plot, which has by and large taken over the movie and become the A-plot at this point, so that we do not care what the motives are for giving us the happy ending.  I heard from a professor of mine that Terry Gilliam once said filmmakers could cut anything they wanted to from the last fifteen minutes of a film and not even the biggest fans of the movie would care so long as they got their happy ending, and while I’m not sure if the attribution is accurate, the principle is exemplified in Singin’ in the Rain.

There’s also a lot more cleverness to this film than I remembered.  Heck, the opening shot of the film is a way of doing the credits that I haven’t seen done in any other film, and it’s one of the best beginnings a movie’s ever had.  They also take great care in the film’s first act to save the reveal of Lena’s voice for just the right moment, which is all handled very “stealthily” in a way, in that they make sure the audience doesn’t suspect the whopper of a gag that the movie has planned with her.  Cosmo’s dialogue is superb, and clearly set the tone for all the “comedic sidekick” characters to come.  There are a few elements of the film that seem to borrow from, or perhaps pay homage to, Babes in Arms – particularly the scene showing the industry’s sudden transition from silent films to sound films.  Parts of the movie are significantly more over-the-top and theatrical than I remembered, but the theatricality is at its peak during the “Broadway Melody” number, which just might be the most gorgeous scene in all of cinema – it’s sort of like expressionism on steroids.  It all comes together to make for a delightful experience that no one should miss.

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Batman Begins Review: Upon Further Consideration…

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Most of the time when I review a movie on this website, I’m doing it because I hadn’t seen the film before.  “Upon Further Consideration…” is the series I use once in a blue moon when I feel like sharing my thoughts on a film I haven’t seen in a long while.

Since I talk too much about how I generally disapprove of what Christopher Nolan did with Batman, I thought it would be best for me to finally sit down and watch The Dark Knight all the way through – which I probably should have done before I started complaining about how it’s the film that’s ruined the theatrical beauty of cinema.  However, when I went to the library to pick up a copy of The Dark Knight, I realized that I was uncertain as to whether or not I had seen its predecessor, Batman Begins, also by Nolan.  For this reason, I picked up Batman Begins and watched that instead.  As I watched the film, I continued to be unsure as to whether or not I’d seen it before, because the beginning was very familiar, but I didn’t recognize much of what happened after Bruce went back to Gotham.  Since I knew the ending and seemed to recall various parts scattered throughout, I came to realize that I must have seen it before – or at least most of it – but it’s just a really forgettable film.

First of all, there’s that blasted visual style.  In this movie, it’s not quite as gray as I expected, instead focusing a lot on brown, but it seems the color scheme turns to the Nolan light-bluish-gray for Dark Knight, and finally to blackness for Dark Knight Rises, giving each film in the trio its own color.  It’s a neat way of doing it, but what it’s made me realize is that my conception of the “Nolanization of cinema” is not entirely accurate – while I had always assumed that Nolan’s grayed out Batman update was responsible for the rest of cinema turning gray, I know understand that this does not work out chronologically.  Batman Begins came out in 2005, and Dark Knight came out in 2008, while Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was released in 2004.  This means that I have been incorrect in accusing Nolan of leading to franchises getting retooled for the worse the way that the Potter franchise was, when in fact it was Azkaban that can be blamed for what Nolan did to Batman, and arguably Pan’s Labyrinth is another of the first main culprits.  For this reason it is no surprise that the movie is forgettable – it was just following a trend by adding grays and browns and killing the greatest hits of the color spectrum.  Some shots in the film, on the other hand, surprised me by looking very good, but these were interestingly the shots that very closely resembled Tim Burton’s first imagining of Gotham, and I must ask: what is the point of making a new visual style that looks its best only when it closely copies the old visual style?

Not only is it visually forgettable, but its characters are forgettable.  I really like Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, but that’s only because he’s Morgan Freeman, and there is nothing special about that character on paper – his only value is the actor who plays him.  The villains are threatening and mildly scary, but overall they lack some sort of villainous “it factor.”  I could see myself wearing a T-shirt bearing the face of The Joker, The Riddler, The Penguin, or any number of other DC villains, but not The Scarecrow, and certainly not whatever Liam Neeson’s character is supposed to be called.  Don’t even get me started on Katie Holmes’ portrayal of Rachel Dawes, which I mostly blame on the writing, but there is no excuse for how insufferably bland she is.  Dawes is a device, and one that I never cared about.  At all.  Part of the problem with Dawes is that she’s primarily designed to spew out cat-poster morality at are morally confused protagonist, which gets old and feels preachy.

This leads to one of the film’s greatest weaknesses: its moral confusion.  Never before have I seen a film that spends so much time exploring morality without having any coherence in moral philosophy by the end of the film.  One could argue that this just means the film is “complex” or “complicated,” but it doesn’t have an intelligent kind of incoherence at the end of the film, like what is presented just before the closing credits of Do the Right Thing.  Instead, it feels like listening to a sermon written by a child who just took different moral sayings he heard and threw them all together, without any clue what he was talking about.  Example: at the end of the film, Dawes kisses Bruce, but then says she can’t love him because he has become Batman, while she’s in love with the good man he was before he became Batman, but then she say’s she’s proud of what he’s done as Batman.  So . . . does she like his personality and behavior or not?!  What’s worse is that the film celebrates Bruce for having empathy when he saves Neeson from falling off the cliff in the first part of the film, even when the villains try to convince him that empathy is bad, but at the end of the film – after all this talk about how wrong it is for good people to do nothing – he decides he will not save Neeson from dying in the train.  It is now his choice to withhold his empathy and his goodness that is considered a positive trait, which makes the film give out more mixed signals than Dawes does.

I think it goes without saying that I think this movie is, in many respects, a train wreck.  Nolan tried to make the audience take Batman very seriously, but, ya know . . . HE’S A GUY IN A BAT COSTUME – it’s inevitably going to be either campy or awkward, so he should have had more fun with the character.  So, so much of this film just feels off, strange, flat, or inconsistent, and the film adds virtually nothing of value to what Burton had so perfectly established as the cinematic Batman in 1989.  Yet, in a way, it still feels like a Batman movie, and that makes it fun.  Not as fun as it could be, but fun.  It’s interesting and amusing enough to be enjoyable, so I think that, all things considered, it’s okay.  Not great – maybe not even good – but okay.  I’ll give it a good rating because I find it entertaining enough, but does this mean I’ll have to stop giving Nolan such a hard time?  Oh, wait – no it does not – I still have to watch The Dark Knight . . . .

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