Rise

By the time you read this, the actual movie called The Dark Knight Rises will have been completely eclipsed in the popular imagination by the shooting at a July 20th midnight screening of the movie in Aurora, Colorado, in which 12 people were killed and 58 wounded. James Holmes, the 24-year-old man who (allegedly) committed the crime had died his hair red, bought a ticket, entered the theater, put on a gas mask and a bullet-proof vest, set off some sort of gas bomb, and then, with an assault rifle and a shotgun and a revolver, opened fire into the audience as they were just sitting down to see the most anticipated film of the year. Rises is the sequel to The Dark Knight, the movie in which Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker was, perhaps, the greatest depiction of evil in modern film. When Holmes was arrested outside the theater, he told the police that he was the Joker. The picture of Holmes that has appeared in most stories about the San Diego native is that of a young man smiling as if he has just won the lottery or as if he were deranged. It seems the latter is most likely true.

What Holmes did in Aurora is something that the Joker would have done. It had no purpose other than to create chaos, fear, and despair. It had no meaning. It has no meaning. Yes, there are actions that could have prevented the massacre. Obviously, you can blame the National Rifle Association for spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting gun control laws that could have prevented Holmes from legally buying an assault rifle. And less obviously, better, cheaper, and more aggressive mental health services could have been able to help and stop Holmes from becoming the monster he has become. But these are political arguments and policy problems. What Holmes and the Joker did in reality and fiction, respectively, were not political or even immoral. Their evil is amoral; it does not have righteousness or belief behind it. It is evil for evil’s sake.

The horrible irony of the Aurora massacre is that Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman movies that started with Batman Begins and ends with Rises is about this kind of evil and the moral bargains that good people must make to fight and beat it. Rises takes place seven years after the action in The Dark Knight, and Gotham City is crime free because of the Dent Law, passed after Batman (Christian Bale) supposedly murdered the supposedly heroic district attorney Harvey Dent. In reality, Dent was the psychotic murderer Two-Face and Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) decided to allow the city to valorize Dent at the Batman’s expense to give the populace hope. Batman has disappeared, and his alter ego Bruce Wayne has taken Howard Hughes-like to the east wing of his mansion. Batman and Gordon’s cynical pact comes back to haunt them and Gotham when a masked mercenary called Bane (Tom Hardy) descends on the city with an army and an insane plan to destroy it with nuclear device designed by Bruce Wayne’s company. Involved in the overstuffed and intricate plot are a talented cat burglar (Anne Hathaway), a beautiful and accented investor in Wayne Enterprises (Marion Cotillard), and a junior detective in the Gotham Police Department (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Of course, Alfred (Michael Caine), Wayne’s butler, is around as well.

No one could hope that Rises could ever be as good as The Dark Knight, which is inarguably the best superhero movie ever made. The main problem with the movie is that Nolan and his brother Jonathan forced the Rises screenplay to tie up the plot threads ofThe Dark Knight and Batman Begins into a perfect and bleak bow. This creates too many contrived revelatory moments, particularly during the film’s third act. However, I honestly didn’t care that I was suffering too many plot twists because I was watching, after all, a comic book movie. I didn’t care that Hathaway wasn’t as a good a Catwoman as Michelle Pfeiffer was in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, because Hathaway was sly, slinky, and funny. I was only bothered a little that Tom Hardy’s voice was occasionally muffled by Bane’s mask because, when he could be heard, his speeches were so lyrical and so cynical they gave me chills. And whatever the script problems, watching an epic action film directed by Christopher Nolan and edited by Lee Smith means that chase scenes, fist fights, seemingly impossible stunts, and complex dramatic scenes are executed with the precision needed to be both utterly clear and actually thrilling. I was so excited by the last hour of the film that for an hour afterward, my heart was still racing.

While I have avoided reading other reviews of The Dark Knight Rises, I haven’t been able escape the commentary on Facebook and Twitter from the small but vocal minority who didn’t like the movie. And I wasn’t able to escape the brouhaha about the critics who posted early, negative reviews and received death threats from Batman fans. While I take movies seriously for their cultural, political, and economic power, using an opinion about a movie as an excuse for actual or rhetorical violence is senseless to me. This is especially so when the movie is a meditation on the horror that senseless violence creates.

The Dark Knight Rises
Directed by Christopher Nolan
Written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan
Starring Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, and Anne Hathaway
Rated PG-13
At your local multiplex

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Beastly

While Beasts of the Southern Wild doesn’t open in San Diego for a week, it is open in some other cities, so I thought I’d post my review here now; it will run in LGBT Weekly next Thursday.

At the moment, very few cinemas are showing movies that aren’t loud, computer-generated products for the teen masses. The summer tends to be dominated by movies like The Avengers and Brave and Ted. The small art houses do their best to counter program with nerdy crowd-pleasing indies; this is why Wes Anderson’s wonderful Moonrise Kingdom is doing so well – though it is doing well not just because it’s skillful and smart but also because it has Anderson’s brand attached. Entering into the art house mix is a much weirder, much more daring film from an unknown filmmakers, and it deserves all of the indie filmgoer’s attention and praise, if not more, that Anderson has been enjoying this summers. Beasts of the Southern Wild is unlike anything I have ever seen, a wild and sweet and gritty fantasia about childhood, loss, poverty, individualism and, metaphorically, Hurricane Katrina. It deservedly won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year and the Caméra d’Or award at Cannes. Continue…

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Could it be magic?

How much did I love Magic Mike? So much.

When I told a couple of friends that I was taking my boyfriend to see Channing Tatum dance in a strip club in Magic Mike, there was an exultant, “Oh, that looks sooo bad!” They had the so-bad-it’s-good bloodlust; they were hoping for Showgirls crossed with Coyote Ugly crossed with Staying Alive. “It’s a Steven Soderbergh movie,” I said, and I was met with a few blank looks. “As in Traffic and Erin Brockovich and Oceans 11?” Silence. I decided not to mention Sex, Lies and Videotape.

Whoever was behind the marketing for Magic Mike decided that they were not going to even mention Soderbergh, let alone promote him. They were going to focus the ads on a shirtless, occasionally pantsless Tatum and, in various stages of undress, his costars Alex Pettyfer (I am Number Four), Joe Manganiello (True Blood), Matt Bomer (White Collar), and Matthew McConaughey, all looking like Men’s Fitness models. The only clue that the movie might be more than hot guys stripping to Top 40 music for an hour and half came with how stunning some of the visuals were – washes of sunlight, almost iridescent bleeds of color. We also saw a few seconds of what appears to be some snappy acting.

The marketing worked, because when we saw the movie on opening night, the showing was packed, and it was packed with very excited young women, some of whom were very drunk. (There also appeared to be seven or eight gay guys in the audience.) The first sight of Tatum was met with screams from the audience, and the screaming continued throughout the film whenever a man took off his shirt or showed his ass. There was a lot of screaming. I haven’t been to a movie with this much audience participation since I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show 20 years ago.

As fun as it was to watch all of these gorgeous men show off their perfect abs and how nicely they fit into thongs, the rest of the movie is also deserving of a good scream, too. Soderbergh’s visuals are, as usual, full of unexpected colors and inventive points of view; his edits are quick in places, naturalistic in others, but always propel the story perfectly. And Soderbergh’s direction of Reid Carolin’s very funny and very smart script made it seem as if the entire movie was improvised; everyone seemed totally at ease, their emotions always believable. There’s an actual plot, even if it is cribbed from All About Eve: Mike (Tatum) is the star dancer of Xquisite, a male revue in Tampa run by Dallas (McConaughey), who has the ego the size of the state of Florida and delusions of grandeur to match. Mike is a professional, makes good money, and has dreams of becoming a furniture designer. He meets 19-year-old Adam (Pettyfer), who is stunning and directionless, and helps him get into the show. Adam’s uptight sister Brooke (Horn) disapproves, and she becomes an excellent target for Mike’s endless charm. But as Adam turns into a star, he also turns into a jerk, and the ramifications of Adam’s bad behavior and Dallas’s lack of integrity make Mike question is path.

But the best thing about Magic Mike is Tatum himself. Those of us who saw him in Step Up know he can dance. Watching his long, lean muscular body doing acrobatic hip hop will either will take your breath away or make you scream. He has an odd beauty, the blank face of a dumb jock. This makes him both unthreatening and unspecific enough to serve as a blank screen onto which we can project our fantasies. But his face’s lack of actorly expression allows his audience to underestimate his skill. Because he can act. Magic Mike forces him to articulate almost every emotion, from flirtation to grief, and he is convincing at every turn. Tatum is already a star, but contrary to how Magic Mike was marketed, he may actually turn out to be serious one.

Magic Mike
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Written by Reid Carolin
Starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, and Matthew McConaughey
Rated R
At your local multiplex

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Bravely animating a feminist princess

I liked it. But I didn’t really, really like it.

A great deal has been made out of the fact that Brave is the first Pixar movie with a female protagonist. Since Disney has had female protagonists from the beginning – Snow White was released in 1939 – Pixar isn’t exactly breaking new ground. If anything, Brave is the first major American animated film with a feminist female protagonist. Belle in Beauty & The Beast and Mulan were the closest before, and they weren’t very close at all. But Merida, the tomboy teen princess in Brave, is the sort of character many women hoped for after Anne Sexton’s feminist rewriting of Grimm’s fairy tales in 1971 exposed to a large audience the relentless misogyny of Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty. Continue…

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Vampires fought on the side of the South. Of course.

This will run next week.

If you’ve been to the movies over the few months, you may have seen a preview for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and been one of the hundreds of thousands of people to laugh out loud while saying something to the effect of “What the hell?” It’s an apt response to what is probably one of the strangest premises for a big budget summer action film. Based on the popular, and very postmodern novel of the same name, the film follows the life of our 16th president: the murder of his mother by a vampire, his training as a vampire hunter, his courtship of Mary Todd, and, at the film’s climax, the Battle of Gettysburg, which, in this world, was actually fought between the North and a bunch of long-fanged undead in gray uniforms. Directed by one of the masters of slow-motion combat Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted), it stars Ben Walker (Meryl Streep’s son-in-law) as Lincoln and a typecast Rufus Sewell as his slave-devouring arch nemesis Adam. The movie is knowingly ridiculous, from its premise to the balletic fights and the hilarious rewriting of history. But in that ridiculousness is whole hell of a lot of fun.

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