Let’s put a smile on this blog!
To once again prove that I’m pathetically behind on what’s going on in the world of pop culture: I’ve only now got around to seeing The Dark Knight. At this point, is anyone interested in yet one more glowing yet sad praise of Heath Ledger’s Joker? Yes, Ledger’s performance was hypnotic and is one of the main reasons why this film is rightly hailed as more than your run-of-the-mill comic book adaptation. But that’s all I’ll say on the issue, because you don’t come here to read an elaborate “Me too” blog entry.
The Dark Knight is a good film and better than Batman Begins – the latter was clearly an origins story and therefore somewhat stuck in its template (although doing very well in this respect), but its sequel definitely does much better in terms of providing an interesting, worthwhile antagonist. It does so well, in fact, that Batman/Bruce Wayne suffers by comparison: the film is just so much more interesting when the Joker is on screen. Still, you couldn’t have the one without the other, and the moral dilemmas that Gotham’s favourite anarcho-terrorist poses the Dark Flabberghast are fascinating to watch. The ferries scene, even though it resolves itself without Batman’s input is a vast improvement on the simplistic scenes in the Spiderman films where the general populace pulls together and proves to be heroic in their own right.
It’s not a perfect film, though, not even in it’s genre. There are some mistakes it should have avoided quite easily. For one thing, some of the editing is seriously disorienting and not in a good way – there are scenes that feel like a bad TV edit to get rid of scenes that are too violent, and as a result continuity suffers. Were they trying to keep the film in PG-13 country? (If so, the studio is eminently silly – even without explicit violence this is not a film that you should let your 13-year olds watch.) I don’t mind the disorienting editing of the fight scenes, but there the lack of clarity has a purpose. The continuity wobbles get especially bad in the batpod scene where I felt that they’d buggered up the sequence of scenes.
The film also tries to cram too much into its running time, and where it tries too hard to make us believe something. I’m not complaining about the two villains, because Harvey Dent’s fall from grace follows smoothly from the Joker plot. However, the scene where Bruce Wayne and Alfred get the fingerprint from the bullet? Overly complicated, to a point where it barely makes sense. Same goes for the bat sonar and the ethical quandary that comes with it: not only does it feel overly gimmicky in the film, it’s also much less interesting and complex than the Joker-induced “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. It feels like a top-heavy retro-active explanation for how Batman manages to find the Joker later in the film, and surely it could have been done in a more elegant way.
These quibbles aside, though, the film is definitely worth watching. It’s worth it for the visuals, it’s worth it for the acting, and it’s worth it to see to which dark corners Nolan will take its hero. If there’s a third film, I’ll be happy to follow him there.
Hamsterdam and the gooey kablooie
You have to admire Stringer Bell’s attempts to de-thuggify the Baltimore drug trade. His endeavours to get his business away from the drive-by shootings and everyday violence is one thing; his sweet, endearing (not words easily used when it comes to The Wire, except for everyone’s favourite addict Bubbles) meeting rules are something else altogether. It wouldn’t feel more strange to have these dealers and “soldiers” in the drug war speaking in Jane Austenese.
Season 3 of The Wire once more is among the best TV there is. It’s smart, impeccably crafted and unexpectedly funny. (A shout-out has to go to “My dawg…”.) I’m also finding it less affecting than the second season, though. Is it that the stevedores represented by Frank Sobotka had more pathos? Frank’s final episode nearly had me in tears. Or is it that I, in spite of my impeccable bleeding heart credentials, can relate better to pudgy, corrupt white guys with receding hairlines than to black hoppers slinging red tops and getting hot and bothered about semi-automatics.
There’s more than enough here to get to the viewer, though: Cutty’s attempts to get back into the game after 17 years in prison, or Bunny Colvin’s subversive social experiment born out of a frustration with the shambles and hypocrisy of the war on drugs and a wish to do something, however radical, that might actually break the stalemate and help.
And on that happy note I’d like to thank Amazon for its special offers. (No, I don’t get paid for this. I should, though!) Thanks to them, seasons 4 and 5 of The Wire are on the way and I don’t even feel too guilty about spending the money. I’m slowly running out of interesting HBO series, though… so in one, two years’ time I’ll either be reduced to Sex and the City – or it’s back to Six Feet Under. In which case I might as well rename this blog “Fisher & Sons”.
Hey, soldier! Leave that kid alone!
As usually, I was late to the party. Everyone ranted and raved about Children of Men when it came out, so I got the DVD almost immediately when it came out. And then it lay around for ages, was moved from one flat to another… and last Saturday we finally thought, “The value of a DVD lies in watching it, not having it,” as Confucius said. Or Yoda. I forget which.
Now, having seen the film, I’d say that the raves were warranted… if the reviewers left the cinema roughly two thirds into the film. The first hour or so of Children of Men is the most compelling, most chillingly credible cinematic dystopia I’ve ever seen. It is also one of the most breathtakingly well shot films – just how on earth did they shoot some of those long takes?
For a long time, Children of Men succeeds in making a horrific vision of the future all too credible by taking our present-day world and extrapolating. None of the over-the-top gadgetry of other near-future films. (While I’m embarrassingly fond of Strange Days, that millennial melodrama does look extremely dated. That film was right, however, in assuming that whatever entertainment technology will be the next best thing, it’ll largely be used do commodify violence and porn. Now let me go back to play GTA 4.)*
I also like that the film doesn’t provide lots of explanations and exposition. It throws its viewers into a world where the youngest child is 18 years old, where people have become almost indifferent to small-scale terrorist bombings but can’t stop crying over the killing of a Brazilian teen just because he happens to have been the last baby born. Where “Rah, rah, we are the best!” chauvinism has become the norm. And every one of these developments has its roots in our present day. Eighteen years of a slow, ongoing apocalypse will do that to you, I guess. But none of this is dwelled on. While watching the first hour of the film I never felt like the film was trying to tell me something in six-foot high, bolded letters.
But then the film becomes more heavy-handed. We get images that are clearly inspired by Abu Ghraib. We get grimy ethnic refugees in wartorn Bexhill. And to me at least, it all looks less like an extrapolation of our current world and more like editorial comments on current conflicts. Yes, the beginning of the film also commented on our present-day world, but it did so much more subtly, in the background. There’s a richness to the scene-setting that is more convincing and more complex than the in-your-face correspondences of the last 30, 40 minutes.
It doesn’t help that while the first hour of the film focuses on dialogues and characterisation, it ends on what is mostly running and shooting. At least the main character doesn’t become an action film hero (there’s a gorgeously funny escape roughly at the half-way point which plays refreshingly different from what you’d get in a Hollywood action film), but still, there are only so many variations on the theme of running away and being shot at .
Sadly I’d heard so much about the key scene where the guns fall silent at the sound of a baby crying, so when it came it didn’t strike me the way it struck many viewers. The Bexhill transition had taken me out of the film so much that the scenes of awe-struck ‘fugees staring in almost religious rapture at the first baby in 18 years, with the occasional poor sod in the background being shot while gawping, struck me as almost Monty Pythonesque – “Oh look, bab-eurgh!” “Look at its widdle fing-blam!” Or perhaps I just had a phase last Saturday of being a callous bastard… or perhaps it was that I didn’t quite buy the Uncanny Valley CGI Baby. Earlier scenes – the amazing sequence in the car, or Michael Caine’s final moments – got to me much more.
(Yes, I am evil.)
In some ways I think I’d reacted better to the film if I’d known less about it – but even then, I would have felt disappointed by the abrupt shift in tone. The moment that Peter Mullan’s cartoon character Syd turns up is the moment that the film sharply turns into something different, and much less compelling, than before. I came away feeling that I’d seen the beginning of a masterpiece and the end of an okay dystopia. I just wish I’d been able to finish watching that masterpiece before someone spliced a decidedly inferior film, though one strangely starring the same actors playing the same characters, into the reel.
*Actually, I haven’t got the equipment to play GTA 4, so I’m stuck with lower-tech virtual snuff. Poor widdle me.
