Tetherd Cow Ahead

On a website for a film called Paranormal Activity, shouldn’t the only choice for trailer size be ‘Medium’?

While in my local video store a few days back, in a rare moment of consumer weakness ((I’m not much of a ‘bargain’ shopper – I figure that bargain is just retail code for “We’ve got too many of these bloody things Hank – see what you can do to free up some shelf space…”)) I succumbed to a ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offer and picked up a DVD compilation of all the episodes and the ‘movie’ of the 80s science fiction tele-epic V.

It didn’t seem like such a bad deal really – Violet Towne and I both had fond memories of V. You remember the schtick I’m sure: huge alien space ships the size of Donald Trump’s ego appear rather abruptly over a good number of the world’s major cities and hover there j-u-u-u-s-t long enough to give everybody the heebie jeebies. It turns out that the wait is merely due to the alien leader putting on her face. The doomsaying of a few negative Earthling Cassandras is, it appears, just overactive xenophobia. Shucks – the alien ‘Visitors’ are a jolly happy lot who want nothing more than to lend a helping hand to the struggling new kids on the intergalactic block. And to eat all our hamsters, steal our water and suck out our brains – but it’s not like anyone could have seen something like that coming, right?

Sure, there were a few troubling indicators, if you knew where to look: the aliens’ appalling dress sense (well, it was the 80s, so it’s not like they stood out that much), their insistence on wearing sunglasses indoors (that didn’t start happening for Earthlings until the 90s, so I guess that was a demonstration of the visitors’ advanced culture) and their habit of snacking on mice out of dumpsters (but hey – if you’re discreet…). Oh, and if you happened to tear their skin off, there was a surprise lizard underneath. ((In what must be one of the cheapest budget decisions made for a science fiction movie EVER, the Visitors never appeared as their lizard selves. Never. Not once. They goose-stepped around earth in their orange-uniformed monkey-suits, procreated with Earth women without giving anything away (now that must have been interesting) and relaxed in the privacy of their own off-Earth ships in their stretchy homo-prostheses. No alien in the history of science fiction has shown such dedication to keeping incognito!))

In any event, it didn’t take VT and I long to realise that our fond memories of V had taken on the rosy glow that only nostalgia can lend. The series (which David Icke probably thought was a documentary), was, in fact, pretty damn awful. The general structure of the thing certainly did have potential (ham-fisted Third Reich analogs notwithstanding) and the feeling of distrust and helplessness in the face of an implacable adversary is an idea that has a lot going for it. Our twenty-something selves evidently saw past the frightful soap-quality acting and into something of the concept’s promise – over the years our memories have thankfully expunged much of the dreadful dialogue and appalling plot contrivances.

Last night we got to the end of Series 2, in which, overcoming the sobering improbabilities of mammalian and reptilian genetic structures being anywhere near compatible, one of the cast gives birth to alien twins, the arrival of the second of which was undoubtedly supposed to instill terror in the viewing audience. But when the little toothy green reptile muppet ‘baby’ lunged ‘menacingly’ toward the camera (several times for good measure) Violet Towne and I simultaneously shrieked in unison, snorted our pinot through our noses and fell on the floor laughing. How did we ever accept such abominable bathos? I mean it’s not as if there wasn’t any better precedent – V post-dates Ridley Scott’s impeccable (and still mightily effective) Alien by a full 5 years! I guess we were just a lot better at the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ in those halcyon days (and it was television – which in those times was in most cases notably inferior to anything you could see on the big screen).

At several times during our V marathon, VT and I remarked that it was surprising that no-one had attempted a remake of the concept, and, of course, teh internets piped up to let us know that someone is doing just that. It will no doubt thrill all you V aficionados down to your little webbed toes (and have David Icke struggling even harder in his straight jacket) to know that ABC is airing a new series of V this November. And the subset of those devotees who are also fans of Joss Wheedon’s lamentably short-lived Firefly will be doubly chuffed to learn that the Visitor leader is being played by Morena Baccarin – a woman so impossibly beautiful that apparently she can only get roles that require an impossibly beautiful woman who is really a lizard (well, seriously – after a smashing debut in Firefly, she fairly disappeared without a trace. WTF?) Alan Tudyk (Firefly‘s ‘Wash’) also has a major role in the new V ((One is inclined to speculate that people at ABC actually watched Firefly (unlike anyone at Fox, evidently) and knew a good thing when they saw it…))

I think we can assume that ABC is attempting a Battlestar Galactic-style remake of V, which, all things considered, could be kinda fun. At least we can expect the acting to be better, and hopefully something a little less lumpen in the way of allegory and story.

I have to confess, though, Faithful Acowlytes, that these musings have become something of a digression from my original purpose for this post – I meant to use my examination of the colourful antics of V to illuminate an entirely different matter involving aliens and earthlings. As this post has already become rather lengthy, I’ll forbear for now. But stay tuned for Part 2, in which we’ll ask some serious questions about alien/human interaction. And no, it doesn’t involve kinky lizard porn.

Recently over at Nurse Myra’s Gimcrack Hospital, we had cause to discuss the ‘curse’ on the 1976 movie The Omen, starring Gregory Peck & Lee Remick. Numerous movies are affected by such ‘curses’ (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Poltergeist and The Crow to name but a few) and it will come as no surprise to you, dear Acowlytes, that about such matters I am highly skeptical. So, as I promised Nurse Myra, today I’m donning my Tsk Tsk Tsk Hat and taking a look at the Omen Curse through my acid-tinted glasses.

Nurse Myra’s jumping off point was an article that appeared in the Sunday Herald that features the point of view of the designer of The Omen, John Richardson, who paints a grim picture of the bad luck surrounding the making of the film.

You can read the Herald’s picturesque account if you want to get the full flavour, but it would take me pages to go into detail, so I’m just going to bullet point the gist of it:

•1: John Richardson and his assistant on the film, Liz Moore were in an horrific car accident in Holland, in which Moore was killed.

•2: Afterwards, Richardson claims that he realised the accident bore uncanny similarities to a death in The Omen, in which actor David Warner is decapitated.

•3: Richardson also saw a road sign at the site of the accident that indicated it was 66.6 miles from the Dutch city of Ommen.

•4: Gregory Peck’s son killed himself two months before the film commenced shooting.

•5: When Peck set off for London to start on his role, his plane was struck by lightning over the Atlantic Ocean.

•6: A plane carrying Omen Executive Producer Mace Neufeld was struck by lightning a few weeks later.

•7: The hotel where Neufeld was staying in London was bombed by the IRA, as was a restaurant where the some of the cast and crew were due to dine on November 12.

•8: Stuntman Alf Joint was injured when a stunt when wrong.

The article goes on to describe how “everyone involved in the production was freaked out to some extent. They all felt that something wasn’t quite right and that included the cast.”

Well, there we have it. The scariest thing in the whole report is the grammar in that last sentence. ((Although I have been on a number of films where we all felt the cast wasn’t quite right, so perhaps that’s what they really meant.))

Even just bullet-pointing the ‘best evidence’ for a curse, rather than using the highly coloured language of the article, throws a sobering light on the collected anecdotes. For the sake of pedantry, though, let’s cast the Cow Eye of Rationality over them and see what we can determine:

•1: From the get-go we’re on shaky ground. The credit list for The Omen reveals that John Richardson was not a designer, as the Herald writer tells us, but is instead listed on the IMDB under Special Effects – an entirely different department. A small point perhaps, but a very good example of how misinformation propagates in these kinds of urban legends. The car accident in question actually happened almost a year after Richardson finished on The Omen, while he was working on A Bridge Too Far. Since Liz Moore is not credited on either film, we must raise an eyebrow on her actual credentials for being ‘cursed’ at all. Is it enough to merely work with someone who has been involved with a cursed film, to bring the curse down on yourself? That would certainly increase the potential victim pool by a substantial order of magnitude.

And even if Moore did work on the film, why did the curse indiscriminately pick on an assistant, rather than go for a head of department? Was it afraid of a fight or something? ((Some reports say Moore was Richardson’s girlfriend, but I haven’te been able to substantiate this. It would make sense.))

•2: Moore’s injuries were identical a to death depicted in the movie, so the legend goes – specifically the untimely end of David Warner’s character, Jennings, who is decapitated by a sliding sheet of glass. Gruesome, for sure, but heck – don’t people know what kind of things happen in car accidents? Vehicle fatalities are one of the most frequent types of non-natural death in the industrial world and decapitation in such situations is certainly not uncommon. And I would be most surprised to find that the victim’s head was severed as cleanly and bloodlessly as that of Jennings in the film (call me skeptical). So what we’re noting is this: while Richardson was working on A Bridge Too Far, a year after he had completed The Omen, an assistant of his, who we can’t actually be sure had even worked on either film, was horribly killed in a car accident, suffering terrible injuries. Um. So how is it that A Bridge Too Far is not cursed? And anyway far from being the victim of a terrible fate, John Richardson is surely lucky to have survived such an awful tragedy!

•3: Richardson says he noted a road sign that indicated the accident happened 66.6 miles from Ommen. Are you detecting a whiff of over-embroidery here, Astute Acowlytes? Distances in Holland are marked in tenths of a mile? With decimal points on the road signs? I’m prepared to be corrected, but I’d find it highly unusual if this is the case. I suspect that if we drilled down into this factoid we’d find that the accident happened ‘about’ sixty-something miles from Ommen, and the 6.6 has somehow crept into the tale for ‘neatness’.

•4: Gregory Peck’s son committed suicide before the film commenced shooting. This happened two months prior to the shoot. Is the curse prescient as well as omniscient? How far before the shoot would the suicide have been acceptably not the work of a curse? How far after? Are all relatives and friends of all the cast and crew susceptible to a filmic curse, with a two month window on either side of a probably 18 month production timescale? Crikey – given the numbers of folk who work on a film, does it strike anyone that it would be incredible for an accident or death not to happen to any of several thousand people over a two year period?

(I’m also prepared to bet that Peck’s son’s suicide didn’t just, like, happen out of the blue. Suicide usually occurs in profoundly unhappy individuals after some deliberation. Indeed, here we learn that:

He (Jonathan Peck) had serious health problems (most of them heart-related), a recent breakup with a girlfriend, and suffocating work conditions (he was working for a local news station which expected him to come up with a certain amount of footage per day, whether there was any news, or not). On top of all this, he had to live up to being the son of Gregory Peck (and here, his astonishing resemblance might have indeed been a drawback). He left no suicide note, but it’s not hard to speculate that the world just became too much for Jonathan to bear.

So not only is the curse responsible for Jonathan Peck’s suicide, it presumably must also be held accountable for his unhappy life…)

•5&6: Planes get struck by lightning. It happens a lot. I’ve been in a plane that was struck by lightning. ((… and it’s totally possible I watched The Omen either two months before or two months afterward… spoooooky!)) It’s generally not a big deal, and rarely results in any problems of any kind. And again, neither of these two events constitutes the outcome of a curse, since both times, exactly nothing happened to all the passengers and crew on the planes concerned.

•7. The cast and crew were affected by IRA bombings in London in 1975. Duh. 1974 and 1975 represented two of the most active years for the IRA intrusions into England, with 7 serious attacks over that time. Famous and wealthy people stay in expensive hotels and eat in exclusive restaurants. The IRA was consistently targeting expensive hotels and exclusive restaurants. There’s a surprise here?

Notwithstanding the fact that no bombings occurred on November 12 as it happens, so that’s another complete error. And in any case no-one was actually bombed anyway! They all escaped being bombed! Surely, once more, that’s good luck as opposed to the gruesome execution of a horrible curse.

And, if we’re going to expand the curse’s powers to include not only bad things happening, but missing out on bad things happening… well, need I elaborate?

•8: A stuntman was injured on a film! HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!

Stunts are dangerous. That’s why they have professionally trained people do them, rather than just throw the lead actor onto a row of metal fence spikes (although sometimes that would be more desirable). I know a few stunt people. They’ve all had accidents of some degree or other. Again, on a film with a lot of stunts (and The Omen had its share) it would be more remarkable not to have had a few accidents.

Now, I can hear your objections already Cowpokes: “Yes, yes, yes, Reverend, that’s all very well, all those things taken as individual items, but what about them all happening in confluence? Surely that’s the evil handiwork of a curse!”

Well, as we’ve seen, about half of those incidents can’t really be considered bad luck as such, because the sum result for those involved was no consequence at all. To the contrary, not being in a restaurant that was bombed is surely the best kind of luck you can have! The remaining unhappy events (all cherry-picked out of hundreds of thousands of possibilities after the fact) can be easily assimilated as the normal flux of daily life mixed with some exaggeration and a little bit of coincidence. All entirely within the realms of natural occurrences.

Movie curses (like other famous ‘curses’ such as the one on the tomb of King Tutankhamen) work on one very simple principle – if you allow your criteria to be stretched to the widest possible extent, you can, with hindsight, find all kinds of seemingly ‘related’ phenomena. Because the ‘logic’ is retro-fitted to the circumstances, anything can be interpreted in a manner that befits the curse.

If we examine the ragtag bunch of ‘facts’ from The Omen curse, one thing is immediately evident – there is nothing at all to relate them to one another. How is the Dutch city of Ommen important in any manner aside from having a name that is similar to the name of the film? What has ‘lightning’ got to do with the ideas behind the film, other than in the loosest possible Wrath-of-God way? How come Gregory Peck’s son and Richardson’s partner were bumped off – what did they do to particularly anger The Omen demons that was more egregious than, say, directing the film, or funding it? What have the IRA, or hotels, or restaurants got to do with anything? All these things are just unrelated events tied together by one common thread – over time, disparate people have come to think they constitute a curse!

Seriously, if I was a demon and I wanted some serious curse action, why would I bother with all this maybe-it-is-maybe-it-isn’t vagueness? It doesn’t speak well for promotion in the demonic workplace. Why wouldn’t I bump off all the principal players and the director and the producers of the film… in the manner of each of the deaths portrayed in the story… on the night of the premiere? Now that would be food for thought!

But like all myths and hooey, there is no logic, no method and, when it comes down to it, no substance of any kind behind The Omen curse. It is just a piece of pop culture mythology spun out of a general queasiness about entertainment meddling with religion. And, dare I be so cynical, something that did no harm at all to the marketing of the film.

Yeah, I know, I tell you I don’t do movie reviews and yet here’s another one of the damn things. What can I say – I feel compelled to comment on this one for the benefit of my buddies who worked on it and all my overseas readers who may or may not care to see it. So sue me – I’m making this blogging thing up as I go along.

First of all, I’ll get this out of the way so those of you looking for my usual acerbic cynicism can go read The Onion – I liked Baz Luhrmann’s Australia and I’m going to say mostly nice things about it. It’s a big, corny, campy mash of Gone With the Wind, Once Upon a Time in the West, Out of Africa and The Wizard of Oz that makes no excuse for being a melodrama of epic proportions. In fact, it is aligned so much in temperament with Luhrmann’s three ‘Red Curtain’ movies (Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge) that I’m not sure why he has publicly divorced it from those films – it seems to me that preparing an audience to approach it as part of that ouvre might actually help them understand where it’s coming from.

There’s really not a lot to the plot of Australia. It’s a simple tale in two acts that weaves together a three-way love story, cultural biases & preconceptions, and big set action pieces, into a saga of grand, technicolour brushtrokes. It’s not David Lean, and it’s not Sergio Leone (even if it nods at both those directors) but it truly is Baz Luhrmann.

It is, in my opinion, a good thing that Russell Crowe, who was originally cast in the part of ‘The Drover’, pulled out of the film. There would be few who would disagree that, in this picture, Hugh Jackman really owns the role of the stereotypical laconic bushman, and as much as I really didn’t quite buy into the supposed passion between Jackman and Nicole Kidman (playing the prissy-but-ultimately-feisty Lady Sarah Ashley), I think I’d have bought it far less with Crowe doing the canoodling. The cast does a pretty credible job in the main, with Brandon Walters as ‘Nullah’ upstaging just about everyone without apparently even trying, and Bryan Brown and David Wenham playing bad guys of such extreme pantomime that I expected that they just might attempt to tie Kidman to some railway tracks.

For Australians, the film is a real round-up of familiar local performing talent. Barry Otto, Bruce Spence, Jack Thompson, David Gulpilil, Arthur Dignam, John Jarratt, Max Cullen, Sandy Gore and a host of other recognizable faces flit across the screen, filling the movie with a nostalgia that few foreigners will feel. The Australian countryside never looked more spectacular, lush with beauty from billabong to Never Never. With all these elements in play it’s as if Luhrmann has tried to distill the essence of every Australian ‘landscape’ film ever made (and by that I mean the films of grand throw, such as Sunday Too Far Away; The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith; Mad Max; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Dead Heart; The Man From Snowy River; Rabbit Proof Fence et al) into one swirling mélange of Aussie popular film history. The music by David Hirschfelder operates on a similar level of pastiche, deftly weaving together quotes and variations on Sheep May Safely Graze, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Waltzing Matilda with the original score. Other references to Australian culture abound; Nullah’s dog is called Jedda; Lady Ashley’s horse is called Capricornia. It’s this cheeky love of detail, and the film’s sense of fun with the high drama that confidently keeps it from veering towards what could easily have been a rudderless mess. It’s truly operatic cinema.

The film is beautifully photographed by Mandy Walker and the costumes by Catherine Martin are gritty or pretty, as required. The production design and art direction are rich and elaborate – unsurprising in a Luhrmann picture, and the film sounds good and solid, if a little workmanlike (personal beef: if you’re making all your other components so hyperbolic, why wimp out on the sound?). There is rather too much music for my taste, and some of the visual effects are a bit ropey, but that’s hardly surprising given the rush in post-production to meet the screening date. The pic has been criticized for being over-long, and long it is, but it is always engaging enough to stop it bogging down.

Is Australia a true reflection of Australia?

Yes. Outback cattle stations do really look like that, and those big droves really did happen; Australians do really talk like that,† (although a drover would likely use something a little more salty than ‘Crikey!’ as an expletive); there really was a man known as ‘The Cattle King’ (Sir Sidney Kidman – no relation as far as I know) who systematically bought up millions of acres of outback cattle country and became very wealthy; the Aboriginal people really do ‘sing’ the land; Darwin really was bombed in WWII (the only serious incursion of the Japanese into Australian territory‡); we do shoot kangaroos, and eat them; Aboriginal trackers did help the white police hunt Aboriginal ‘fugitives’, and Aboriginal children were, for far too many years, removed from their families and raised in ‘good Christian missions’ (including an island off the coast of the Northern Territory); the Wet does save the land every year, and the results are just as spectacular as they look in the movie.

The flavour of an archetypical and mythical Australia suffuses the film, and I’m really glad about that, even if it is mostly a cliché. It’s the same kind of myth that you find in the Wild West and the Deep South of the old-fashioned American cinema that I loved as a kid. No-one’s really attempted this in Australian cinema (with the exception of The Man From Snowy River, perhaps) and even if it’s kinda quaint as a concept, someone needed to do it, and that someone could really only have been Baz Luhrmann.

Is Australia a true reflection of Australia?

No. I can’t imagine a pub full of drinkers of any era actually singing rousing choruses of Waltzing Matilda; the real Cattle King, although famously tight-fisted, was not the villain he is painted in the film, and he died in 1935, well before the war started; as far as I know, there are not, and never have been, such tipples as ‘Poor Fella’ rum, or ‘Kanga’ lager; station bosses in the outback probably didn’t have revolvers in holsters as a general rule (I don’t say that with any authority – it’s just that rifles are much more useful than pistols out on the cattle stations); even though the Wet refreshes the land like nothing you’d believe, an outback station would hardly support an explosion of azaleas, a lawn, and – what was that – a frangipani? So Baz has been flexible with the truth in the interests of the operatic vision.

But then, the clinical Old West of Leone and Ford, the genteel South of Mitchell & Fleming and the frosty Russia of Lean are all colourful caricatures too, and we love them despite their foibles. Why not Australia?

I saw the film in a packed cinema here in Hollywood. I assume that the LA audience is relatively sophisticated and probably nearly as cynical as I am. Yet when the lights came up, they applauded the film and they applauded the director. They may not have left the cinema with an accurate historical picture of Australia but my guess is that they left with an accurate assessment of the spirit of Australia. And what more could you ask of a movie than that?

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†And not at ALL like the execrable supposedly-Australian accent I heard from an actor in Frost/Nixon the other night – you’d think they could find at least one Aussie actor in Hollywood…

‡Japanese ‘mini’ submarines also made it into Sydney Harbour, quite unbelievably, but caused little damage.

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OK, so I’m in Hollywood, and a good friend of mine takes me to see the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace at the premier Hollywood theatre The Arclight (did I remember to mention that I am in Hollywood?)

Anyway, the film is a big boofy blow-up-everything-in-sight action piece. Lots of car chases, lots of gunfights, lots of (relatively new for Bond, and quite irksome) naval-gazing and self-reflection, and the requisite pantheon of bad guys and hot babes. Well, not nearly enough hot babes for my taste, but you get the picture. Lots of money spent on lots of excess.

The lights come up at the end of the film and the girl sitting next to me says to her friend “So. what did you think?”

He ruminates for a second… “Nah. Too Hollywood.‘”

OK, I’m going to be the first to go against the trend with the new ‘dark’ Batman films, namely Batman Begins, and The Dark Knight, and say I just don’t see why everybody goes all wobbly at the knees about them.

Violet Towne and I went to see TDK last night. We spent up big and had great plush seats in the Royalty Only section at Hoyts. We sipped our wine and laughed gaily at the peasants far below as they shuffled through the sawdust into their tiny crowded pit, chewing bacon rind and sucking on brussels sprouts. The Hoyts’ servants fetched us le Choc Tops and le Corn de Pouffe, and we settled back for what we had been assured by all & sundry would be the best 3 hour cine-fest we’d see this millenium.

I wanted to like the film. Really I did. I was entirely ambivalent about Batman Begins after seeing it late in its run and well after it had been hyped out of all proportion. I walked out of it feeling flat, and thinking maybe it was my fault that I didn’t like it – perhaps I’d expected too much. So after all the high praise that The Dark Knight has garnered, I was prepared to eat humble pie and admit that there is merit in the Bat-With-Soul concept after all. But you know what? The Dark Knight was the exact same experience as Batman Begins, only 20 minutes longer. Sure, it’s a well made film, but then so it ought to be these days. In my opinion that’s a baseline – directors who are still in work (especially at this high a level in Hollywood) should be able to ply their craft with at least some panache. The pic is beautifully edited, artfully photographed and designed, and the sound solid and engaging. The score, by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, is great. But the skillful technique of this film proves (like the subject matter of director Christopher Nolan’s previous film, The Prestige), to be all about colour and movement and misdirection; a flash of light and a puff of smoke and the rabbit vanishes – never mind that it reappears from the hat as a rubber chicken.

The plot of TDK is labyrinthine and confusing. I’m not even going to attempt to detail it, mostly because I just gave up on trying to follow it at some point when I realised it wasn’t making any sense (I think it was around the time that Morgan Freeman travels all the way to Hong Kong for the sole purpose of planting a cell phone, rigged to do some kind of highly implausible technical hocus pocus, in a bad guy’s office). That’s really not the major problem of the film though. Plot can happily take a back seat to good characterization and performance, especially if there’s enough detailed psychological and passionate insight to be had from your dramatis personae. And I think this is where everybody gets all gooey with these two Batman films, and where I part company with the crowd. It appears that most punters have taken the self-absorbed whinings and sentimental pique of the characters as actual emotional substance.

It has to be said, first and foremost, that Heath Ledger is mighty impressive as The Joker, and I’m not saying that just because he’s dead. Ledger’s Joker is all that the character should be: an unhinged, sad, dangerous, intelligent, formidable foe. He squeezes everything that is to be had out of this role, and the true melancholy of it is that he will never go on to shine quite so brightly in a film that is actually worthy of his talent. The problem is, however, that Ledger being the dazzling light that he is whenever The Joker is on screen, serves to throw the rest of the film into even murkier shadows than those offered up by the moody cinematography of Wally Pfister. Through long, dull action sequences involving a motorbike even dumber than the Adam West Batman’s ‘Batcycle‘ I kept wishing for The Joker to come back on screen because he was the only character in the film I really felt any empathy for.

This is a serious problem for The Dark Knight – Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) gets killed; I didn’t care. Batman’s love interest, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal), gets killed; I didn’t care. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) gets half his face burned off and turns into the deranged revenge-bent Two-Face; ho hum. A ferry full of refugees from Gotham faces a fiery explosive destruction; yawn. Commissioner Gordon is not really dead after all; zzzzzzzz… wha?

And the interminable, dreary, ponderous, vacillating navel-gazing of Batman… jee-zuz. C’mon! Guys! What is all this crap lately with the superheroes standing forlornly on building tops, despondently brooding over moonlit cityscapes while wracked with self-loathing and maudlin indecision? If it’s not Batman it’s Spiderman. If it’s not Spidey it’s Superman. At least bad guys like The Joker are content with their place in the universe. When The Joker tells Christian Bale’s Batman that the two aren’t so very different, I find myself vehemently disagreeing with the pasty Pulcinello: “At least you’re interesting!” I silently shout at the screen.

Call me old fashioned, but I really don’t give a shit about the angst-ridden ruminations of a character so implausible that he dresses up as a bat to fight criminals. Frank Miller’s 1980s examination of Batman as a troubled, guilt-wracked anti-hero was an interesting and worthy variation on a theme for the superhero genre, and it does probably merit at least some cinematic exploration, but this new three hours worth of “Doesn’t anybody love me?” is just tedious. Christian Bale, a normally very charismatic actor, is forced while in the Batsuit to become as stiff and rubberized as the costume itself, and the gruff, effected voice that is imposed on him as Batman serves to remove even the remotest traces of humanity from the character. In a comic you can kinda carry this off, but in a movie what you end up with is a dorky, sullen and quite emotionally-unapproachable figure. It’s almost impossible to empathize with someone whose eyes and face you can’t see. In one scene featuring a conversation between Commissioner Gordon and Harvey Dent, Batman hangs around in the background like a dullard trying to crash a conversation at a cocktail party. It’s not really anyone’s fault – it’s just that a grown man dressed as a bat doesn’t actually cut much of a credible figure if you stop and think about it.

Superheroes like Batman are inherently implausible creatures. Bringing them into the realms of normal human behaviour is bound to show up the flaws in the conceit. Batman always worked better when he was a nutty do-gooder with above average strength and a laughable side-kick. I think it’s time to give these newfangled moping dummy-sucking Emo-heroes the boot. I think it’s time to go back to when superheroes kicked ass, knew right from wrong and just got on with their proper business of saving the world.

Batman – the Joker is asking the exact right question: Why so serious?