Posts from — July 2012

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES seals the deal with a bang.

At the inception (yup) of writer/director Christopher Nolan‘s The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Gotham has had 8 years of peace – with nothing remotely as threatening as The Joker (respectfully not mentioned ONCE the entire film) having surfaced during this long period of tranquility. Law enforcement is happy, the Gotham elite are happy, life is good, and as a result Bruce Wayne has hung up his spurs and retired the Batman. But of course when shit hits the fan this permanent vacation is cut short. It seems old buddies The League Of Shadows have a score to settle – not only with Bruce but also with Gotham city. Enter a new foe named Bane (Tom Hardy), trained by Ra’s al Ghul himself (the ubiquitous Liam Neeson), who’s come to finish what was started in the first chapter of the trilogy: namely to raze the corrupt city to the ground by any means necessary, in this case a good ol’ fashioned Atom bomb – and to break the Batman in mind, body, and spirit. Add to the mix master thief Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), who complicates matters for Bats and rides the fence about whether Gotham and is worth saving, and you have a heady villainous brew. Of course our brooding hero has a few friends to help him on his journey, in the form of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and “hothead” police officer Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), a cop inspired by Batman and more than willing to go beyond the call of duty. Will The Dark Knight and his allies save Gotham? Will Batman endure, as Alfred once foretold? Or does he have a death wish, as Alfred foretells early on? These are the stakes in Nolan‘s final yarn. Does the film work? Yes, though it never hits the levels of excellence of the previous films – there’s nothing as emotionally compelling as the interrogation scene from The Dark Knight, and there’s some pretty silly shit in the form of a mobile atom bomb (why not just level the damn city from a distance?) and a subplot involving police trapped in tunnels for months – all a bit much. But taken as a whole, The Dark Knight Rises merges perfectly with Nolan’s vision, and is a fitting ending – averting the disaster that claimed Sam Raimi‘s Spiderman 3 and Richard Lester‘s Superman 3 – and by so doing achieving that rare feat, of a single-director-superhero trifecta. As for the cast, it’s all accolades – Bale is a solid Bruce/Bats but finds himself in the shadow of some stellar co-stars: Michael Caine is without flaw, the perfect Alfred, end of story. Hathaway and Gordon Levitt are wonderful additions to the lore, expelling any iffy feelings you may have had about their casting within minutes of screen-time. And Hardy does so much with eye contact that it almost (almost) makes his massive muscles unnecessary. He’s creepy, his voice is demented, and it just works. And talk about payoff – the last 5 minutes of this film are truly special, and a brilliant send-off to the entire saga. He saved the franchise with Begins, and gave us two solid films afterwards: though it has minor problems, they aren’t so big as to blemish the big picture- with The Dark Knight Rises Nolan sticks the landing and proves that Comic Book Cinema is here to stay. Allow yourself to fall in, and you’ll find it’s a satisfying ride.

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• Ten Things That Were Stupid About ‘The Dark Knight Rises’(manolith.com)

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• ‘Dark Knight Rises’ as Masterpiece(thedailybeast.com)

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A group of men find themselves in a horrific survival scenario when their plane crashes in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness, right in the midst of some highly pissed, highly territorial wolves. There you have the plot for 2011′s The Grey, a motion picture that stays with you, and which was marketed horribly – there hasn’t been a single trailer selling this film correctly: while the music cues and the presence of Taken‘s Liam Neeson sell it as an action film, it is in fact an altogether sad, desperate, hopeless, and oddly poetic drama. Savoring the bleak, hopeless ride that is Joe Carnahan‘s latest I wonder to myself – “how did the guy that directed Smoking Aces (2006) and The A-Team (2010) craft this gut-punch of a film whose honor I would fight for?” This is not to ‘dis his past work, but minus Narc (2002), I’ve found Joe to be a  little… loud. Well, The Grey is anything but. What action there is is meant to pull at your heart strings, not make you go “fuck, yeah.” In fact it goes out of it’s way to evoke an intimacy which Carnahan maintains through aggressive close-ups, a sense of imminent dread, and a fragmented building of character, so that by journey’s end we know exactly what kind of men these are, and the lives they lead. We are invested in this group of cowards, heroes, fathers, etc. – some of them bad – who find themselves at the ends of the earth, forced to bond together in a common goal of survival. It’s a film that simply does not let up, running these characters through a gauntlet of pain from which there is no relief in sight. Writer/Director Carnahan gets A plus performances from his cast and uses the wolves as a metaphor, not a crutch (i.e. if you think this a film about wolves, think again), bringing details to life like a champion: who knew something as simple as a billfold could drive a narrative so cleverly? And the film has the best “Cussing Out God” scene since Conan The Barbarian. For that alone Joe has my respect. Lead actor Liam is already a presence in the film world, but here he lets it all hang out. Hitting a little close to home with its subject matter (Liam’s wife died in a skiing accident just a few years prior), his performance is easily one of his best yet. If you’ve been following us so far, you know we mainly recommend films – after all, our mantra is ‘what to watch when you’re stranded‘.  So yes, I heartily recommend The Grey – it’s a ‘band of brothers’ on their worst journey ever. And it’s the only Joe Carnahan film to ever make me cry. There. I said it.

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• The Grey(smallscreenreviews.com)

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Continuing with our Exploding Heads series, we bring you 2009′s District 9, Neill Blomkamp‘s go-for-broke big-screen debut. When people die in this film, they die horribly – limbs flying hither and tither, aliens popping like balloons, and yes indeed – heads exploding. More than once. In case you haven’t seen the film here’s the plot in a nutshell: aliens (known locally as ‘Prawns’) have landed on Earth – South Africa to be exact – and they are in poor shape. We humans have set aside ‘districts’ to keep them in order, or better yet away from us. With that Apartheid vibe locked firmly in place we have our particular exploding head scene, as Poor Wikus Van De Merwe (played masterfully by Sharlto Copley) is tasked to relocate the ‘Prawns,’ from one district to another. He learns rather quickly this will be no easy task, and to complicate matters, he himself is slowly becoming a Prawn, thanks to Alien “black goo” (Take that Prometheus)! (moral of both stories: don’t touch alien stuff). To further complicate matters, some superstitious human locals believe that by eating his newly formed Prawn arm they will gain magical powers. Crazy, right? Seconds away from having his arm eaten, Wikus needs a miracle. And it comes in the form of some new-found Prawn friends, and the human tendency to stockpile weapons, even if they can only be operated by aliens. Yay! Human greed comes to Wikus’ rescue! Enjoy the mech madness – the head pop comes at the 1:05 mark.

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