marramgrass

After months of waiting, and of hype that seemed to get whipped up even further after the death of Heath Ledger in January, I toddled along on Thursday night to catch The Dark Knight. Along with, seemingly, half of Belfast. It was hoachin’.

Did I enjoy it? Oh yes. Was it “the best movie, like, ever“? No, not really, but a pretty fine show all the same.

The obvious question: Heath Ledger as the Joker? He was great. Folks have asked me how he compared to Jack Nicholson in the Burton version — actually, I think the whole internet was asking that before the film opened. I felt that Ledger’s unhinged nihilist (ooh, look at me) was much more menacing — and Joker-like — than Nicholson’s self-assured… Jack Nicholson standard character.

I know others will disagree, but I was also completely onboard with the handling of Harvey Dent/Two-Face.

The film belonged to Heath Ledger, Aaron Eckhart and Gary Oldman (an actor who we’ve never really seen enough of). It almost seemed to me like Batman was the white space around these three that let them do their thing, and do it in spades.

Criticisms? The Bat-voice, so comical as to be distracting, is one of the beats where the Nolans lost some of their intended realism. That, and some of the daft Bat-gadgetry, just didn’t seem to fit. Casting wise, I wish Maggie Gyllenhaal had had something to do other than [SPOILER]. She was wasted. If only Ms Gyllenhaal had been there last time round, then Katie Holmes could’ve handled the character’s three or four lines for this one.

I approached this one as energetic popcorn entertainment and left most of my analytical brain at home, but Glenn offers a some deeper thoughts. Batman has always been the hero who will never get an easy ride. His lack of any ’superpower’, his difficult past and his blunter-than-normal vigilante status see to that.

It’s a characterization that lends itself to the darker, grittier kind of movie that Batman Begins and The Dark Knight have been. Batman works because he’s just that little bit closer to what might be possible, but he makes us uncomfortable because he shows us the consequences that neither Superman, Spider-Man nor the X-Men ever did. We can read life onto him much more easily. He’s a bit of white space that allows us to fantasize and moralize and perhaps question what justice might be, here in the real world.

Unfortunately, in this one, Bruce Wayne and Batman were almost (Rachel Dawes) the thinnest characters there, and it was left to Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent to hold the line.

It’s still the best movie I’ve seen this year, I think, and probably due a second viewing sometime soon.

There’ve been a couple of films and a book lately that I intended to comment on. Here goes.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is what happens when a Respected Literary Author™ tries a little genre fiction. A fairly standard post-apocalyptic yarn, it’s been around for a couple of years and is currently being made into a film starring Aragorn. In a nutshell, America (the world?) is enduring the aftermath of an undetailed (nuclear?) disaster. Society has collapsed, survivors are eating each other, and a man and his young son are trekking across the country in an attempt to find a little safety and security.

The Road gathered very positive reviews, singing the praises of McCarthy’s handling of his fairly sci-fi premise and how he uses it to great effect to explore themes of civilization and fear of death, along with some deftly handled father-son relationship issues.

I wasn’t quite so impressed.

Yes, the book does all those things, but I suspect it gained from the reviewers not being too familiar with the genres in which McCarthy was squatting. Disaster-destroys-civilization has been a popular device over recent years, and lends itself well to this kind of philosophising — so it’s been done a lot, lately.

If you want a study of the end of civilization in all its fascinating horror, check out Max Brooks’ World War Z. I’d love to say that Brooks hasn’t got McCarthy’s touch with language, but actually I found his prose much more interesting and affecting. Sometimes The Road is too clever for its own good: yes, screwing around with punctuation may reflect the chaos and disorder of post-apocalyptic America, but it makes it damned hard to read. (Of course, ‘genre’ authors can be guilty of this, too. The phonetically written portions of Iain M. Banks’ Feersum Endjinn are as tiring to read as they must have been to write.)

Maybe I’ve got a chip on my shoulder that’s tempting me into a rant. Maybe not. I read a lot of SF and fantasy, but I read a lot of literary fiction, too. I have the fervour of an evangelist trying to convince the world of all the quality writing that exists in the ‘genres’. I just find it sad and a little elitist that when a well-known literary author tackles themes and ideas that have been done very well by genre authors, he gains far greater recognition than those genre folks.

Enough of that. On to a few films:

Iron Man has, I think, claimed the position of my favourite comic book adaptation. Robert Downey, Jr made a most excellent Tony Stark, and the whole thing was great fun.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t so hot. It had one or two good laughs, but on the whole it’s best forgotten.

We watched Knocked Up a few weeks back. This was why I went to see Sarah Marshall, because this one was good. It’s the next stage of coming-of-age film after American Pie et al — what happens when the drunken sex leads to pregnancy? The humour may be low-brow, but the characters are surprisingly subtle and the whole thing is sweet and sensitive.

The Heartbreak Kid joins the list of the worst films I’ve ever seen.

Looking at that short list, it seems that I’ve mainly been consuming cinematic fluff recently. Ah. So be it; does you good, sometimes.

While I’m still slowly reading through NT Wright, in between I’m having great fun with a series of cheesy fantasy novels.

I think that’s me up to date with the reading and the watching I wanted to mention. Was it good for you?

The trailer for this year’s bizarrely-titled fourth Indiana Jones movie is out: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

I’m curious to see how they play Indy being almost twenty years older than last time.

Am I looking forward to it?

Oh yes.

It may only be February, but I don’t expect to see a better film than Juno the rest of this year. If you object to some mild spoilers, it’s probably best you stop reading now and go and play a game instead.

Juno of the title is a sixteen year-old girl who decides it’s time to experiment sexually and enlists her friend Paulie to join her — then she ends up pregnant.

It’s a familiar enough premise, but where the movie then goes is unlike anything I’ve seen recently. What marks it out for me, and what makes it so special, is the sheer believability of it all.

Underneath the so-hip-it-hurts witty banter (Juno talks like every teenager wishes they did — she talks like I wish I did), the characters and their relationships, their confusion and fear and their developing reactions to the situation all ring true.

The only real sticking point is that dialogue, which initially feels a little contrived and a little too self-aware, but within ten minutes my brain had found its rhythm and took it for what it was, a little bit of humourous caricature that emphasises depth and honesty rather than hiding it. Ellen Page layers it over her character while still showing us the confusion and insecurity that Juno doesn’t quite want to admit to.

Michael Cera is half of the duo that made Superbad so engaging despite its ick, and he does the same here as the father of the child, fumbling his way through the sweet little love story. He also has the line that captures perfectly what it’s like to be a teenager (at least the way I remember it): Juno says, “‘Cause you’re, like, the coolest person I’ve ever met, and you don’t even have to try, you know…” Paulie’s reply, “I try really hard, actually.”

Other highlights include, unlike in most teen comedies, that Juno’s parents are actually very likable, doing their best to look out for her while they themselves haven’t a clue what to do, and their reaction to her news also seems spot on. The soundtrack sent me straight to iTunes, and the whole look of the film was… I’m sorry that I’m having to stop myself using a word like ‘enchanting’.

The trick the film pulls is that by the end you’ve come to really care about the characters, and when Juno gives birth and is giving her baby up to be adopted, and her father sits with her without saying much, you’re just about ready to cry with her.

Teenage pregnancy is a headline-grabber of an issue, but what Juno does, with its little glimpses of grace, is remind that completely apart from sermons and glib ’solutions’, real people have to get on dealing with real life.

Cloverfield yesterday after I finished work. I’ve heard some very positive and some very negative reviews of this movie. Here’s mine. I’ll try and avoid spoilers.

In short, pretty good stuff. The hype machine did its job and I was genuinely excited to see this film. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s an old-fashioned monster movie with the tension turned up — they managed to make the characters sympathetic enough to increase the tension, but with minimal back-story. The monsters are class and the handheld filming is very effective, but I had to take regular breaks from looking at the screen: I doubted all the tales of the film inducing motion sickness, but on the big screen it hit my stomach hard. The sound design (no music on the soundtrack until well after the closing credits have started) is actual genius. I don’t use the word lightly — I suspect the audio is a major part of the strength of the film.

I’m conflicted, though.

I’ve read a lot of debate over the destruction of New York-9/11 parallels (for example). I’m not in a position to call that one, since I’ve never even visited the States. I did think about it while watching some of the early destruction scenes, although I can’t say if it’s because I was aware of the discussion beforehand or if it was something the film would have provoked in me by itself. Anything further is too easy for me to say from several thousand miles away.

What I can expand on is my internal argument that runs thusly: “The total lack of exposition is great!” “I want to know all about the monsters!” “It’s always fun to be left with questions.” “Where’d they come from? What happened to her? Why is it happening?” “Too much detail would have totally ruined it.” “But I like detail!”

There’s room for a whole mythology here, and part of me longs for it. The crew probably have it all written down somewhere, and I want to know. But I don’t. But I… You get the idea.

Cloverfield is definitely worth the short running time, just sit as far back from the screen as you can stand :-)

We watched The Kingdom at the weekend. It’s one of those very worthy films that feels like it’s trying to say something profound about the state of humanity and of the world.

While I enjoyed the film greatly — some excellent acting — the trouble was that I wasn’t ever sure exactly what it was trying to say. The punchline at the end tried too hard and just confused me, especially in light of everything that had led up to it.

It’s tense and interesting, the acting is superb and the Saudi police colonel in particular is an excellent character, but I just don’t know it wanted me to take away.

Still worth a watch, though, and the opening timeline sequence is beautifully done.

I’ve just discovered (via Kottke) Why We Write. It’s a daily (ish) series of essays, mainly (but not solely) by writers who are currently striking members of the WGA.

It’s in my nature to be sympathetic to this strike, enthusiastic as I am about many American drama and comedy shows. Independent of that, though, the essays on the site that I’ve had a chance to read yet are fascinating and fun.

So check the sidebar over there for a new link, and I suggest you plug it inot your reader.

Beowulf.

I was looking forward to that film for ages.

It generally looks rather good. The proof is in a few of the faces (Beowulf, Hrothgar, Wiglaf) which are especially impressive, verging on photo-real. Others (Wealthow, Ursula) weren’t as convincing, and Grendel’s mum (Angelina Jolie) was good at a distance, but not so much up-close. I’m talking about her face, okay? There are a few Shrek-type moments, but I’ve a feeling they were ‘extras’ who were fully computer-generated rather than based on motion-captured actors. I can’t confirm that’s so, but it’s what it looked like to me.

I wish there was anywhere in NI where I could see the 3D version. But there’s not.

Beneath the surface, the writers (Gaiman and Avary) made some very interesting changes to the story. If you read over the Wikipedia page, you’ll find some debate and hand-wringing over this. In the source poem, Beowulf is a straight-and-dull action-hero type, but in this film he’s flawed and prideful, and it’s that pride that is his downfall, forming the thread that focusses and unites the three major sections of the plot.

Maybe I’m a bit of a philistine, but for me that makes for a much more interesting story. Tales of redemption are increasingly common in cinema, it seems, and this is a pretty good one. The way Grendel was played for sympathy (honestly, I think I wanted him to win) only strengthened this side of things.

So why am I disappointed?

Partly, I guess, because the film just didn’t live up to my anticipation. And partly because, despite all the great things about it, I felt at a distance from the action and the characters the whole way through. Maybe that’s a consequence of the motion-capture approach, I don’t know. I do have the feeling that the style was a strength - Ray Winstone’s voice was just right, but I don’t know if he’d have been as convincing ‘live’.

It was pretty good, but I can’t help wondering if it could have been so much more.

The weather today has been simply shocking — there’s lots of flooding going on round here.

Makes you glad to be inside in the warm. I think we’ll be lighting the fire tonight when some family come round.

My plans are well under way. We went to see Beowulf last weekend, and I caught The Golden Compass yesterday. They were, to different degrees, disappointing. I’ll come back to them when I’m not supposed to be writing something I actually get paid for…

The list of films, either currently in the cinema or soon to be released, that I would very much like to see. Any chance?

• Beowulf
• The Golden Compass
• I Am Legend
• AvP: Requiem
• Sweeney Todd
• Cloverfield

It should be a good couple of months for film.

The Golden Compass will be an interesting one. I’ve heard a fair bit of concern from Christians over it all. Me, I’m looking forward to it. It’s a few years since I read the books, so I’ll have to go for a re-read before I can post sensibly, but I remember being struck by the sheer quality of them. Pullman is certainly writing from a worldview that differs from my own, but every author writes out of their own head. In the interviews I’ve been reading (sorry, linkage escapes me right now), it appears that he’s mellowed somewhat in his tone over the last few years. I will track down the books again, watch the film, dig out some bits I wrote the first time I read the books, then see what I have to say…