Thu 21 Aug 2008
Send in the Clowns
Posted by anaglyph under Movies
[22] Comments
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?
well I wasn’t going to see it anyway….
See, this is exactly why DVD’s were invented. Because it is not worth the $70 bucks (by the time you get done with tickets and munchies at “You’ve just been raped” prices.)
Not only that, 3 hours? Seriously?? Who can drink a soda and not have to use the bathroom in 3 hours? Well not me.
These movies come out so quick on dvd anymore, I just wait it out. Spend 4 bucks to rent it, and hit pause when I must relieve myself or beat a child or other such interuptions.
And I probably will rent it just so I can see the Joker. Batman is kinda boring to me.
Thanks for the confirmation Reverend.
I figured this one was going to be a crock when I saw Mr Nolan on TV rabbiting on about how “Batman isn’t a superhero. He has no special powers. He’s just an ordinary guy…”
Ummmm – no. He’s actually a comic book character.
I hear Nolan’s next move will be a Christian Bale narrated docudrama about the Russian invasion of Atlanta.
I liked Batman Begins a lot. Normally, I hate comic book movies. Probably because I have such a low tolerance for the implausible. In the first batman movie, while the actions of the character were not, at least the technology was plausible in our current time. The problem to me with previous batman movies was my innate sense of engineering. The batplane(s)? Come one, there is no way anything that shape could conceivably fly or handle effectively. The batcycles? All retarded.
The Dark Knight fell right back into the foot staring, implausibly gadgety bullshit that I hated about all the other iterations. at least his villain was legitimately terrifying in this one. I wonder what Jack Nicholson could have pulled off with a less Tim Burton type of approach.
I wonder what has taken over the modern mindset that all of our heroes hate themselves?
It could have been much, *MUCH* worse. You could have gone to see Indiana Jones and the Boredom of the Crystal Dull.
Nurse Myra: No – even though the main character is clad entirely in rubber, I’m thinking it wouldn’t really be your cup of tea.
MI: I don’t begrudge the price of the cinema tickets, because I work in the business and I do understand why it’s so expensive. But that’s not actually the point – having a good story and well-developed characters shouldn’t really cost any extra.
evenstar: Sometimes these filmmakers get so far up themselves that they entirely lose track of what they’re actually doing. This blend of angst and superpowers has always crapped me right off, even when it occurred from time to time in the classics. As a kid, I could never understand what the guys in the lurid costumes were griping about – for Pete’s sake, they could leap tall buildings at a single bound and turn invisible! What the hell was their problem? And in Batman’s case, he is inconceivably RICH as well. I really don’t care a jot that a wealthy billionaire is having mental anguish over his public acceptance as a bat-garbed vigilante. The whole thing is so implausible that as soon as you start ascribing any realistic reasoning to it, the whole deck of cards collapses. These are fantasy characters, originally conceived for the purposes of escapism. They simply don’t bear any serious level of scrutiny, except perhaps as a kind of post-modernist deconstructive exercise. But that kind of thing is short lived.
Casey: I know what you mean about the technical implausibility of the old Batman, but the thing is, everything about it was implausible, so the conceit was logically supportable. These new adventures in the superhero mythos are barren and stupid – the filmmakers are asking us to suspend our disbelief in a manner that is completely askew. They want us to accept a fantasy as if it’s reality, and yet they frequently break us out of that reality by throwing in improbable fictions and irrational motivations. You can’t have it both ways. The only method of doing so is to set up a completely contained world with its own self-supporting rule system and stick to it religiously. If the filmmakers actually studied the comics in any detail, they would understand that this is exactly what happens, and why the comics can work where the films fail.
Yes, it says a lot more about the filmmakers than the fiction, in my opinion. Hollywood of late ladles out bucketloads of self-loathing and angst-ridden Narcissism. One is tempted to view Batman as a anthropomorphization of the US – a cashed-up flunked-out ‘superhero’, once everybody’s darling, now relegated to waging its ‘battle against evil’ by the shadow of night whilst staring morbidly inward and wondering why everybody hates it so much. The makers of The Dark Knight would have us believe that Batman is searching deep inside himself for his soul, but the truth is that this version of Batman simply doesn’t know what a soul should actually look like.
Atlas: Thank spagmonster for small mercies.
I don’t begrudge the price of the cinema tickets, because I work in the business and I do understand why it’s so expensive.
Movie tickets are expensive, and so are airline tickets. And you’ve done work for both… I’m beginning to see a cownection here. It’s a cownpspiracy!
Well maybe you’ll sleep more restfully if I tell you the money’s certainly not ending up in my pocket.
Of course not, it’s in your money bin.
I agree, have been railing about it for months
Atlas: My money bin is a fictional as Scrooge McDuck’s.
Malach: We’re the only ones apparently.
Nah mate, you’ve got it all wrong.
The problem with the movie was:
a: Batmans OTT voice (i nearly pissed myself laffing when he first spoke)
b: it was WAY TOO FUCKING LOUD!!!!! I thought I had been out clubbing….
Nice sound design though…
The Joker was brilliant!
A villain who loved nothing more than creating mayhem. The worst sort of Villain, one which we cannot understand. He did not worship money, fame or worldly goods. He scared me witless.
Bale on the other hand as Batman, Boring little rich boy.
I agree with everything that you said. Nicely Executed but Dull. Needed 20 mins lopped off. What was the deal with the 2 ferries? If it was Sydney Harbour they would have just leapt out of the boats and swum for land, KaBLOOwie, with no one on board.
Silly script.
S.
I’m with you on the overall … this movie was a disappointment. I did like the Harvey Dent role, however.
Ledger was great, but I disagree about the Joker character itself. Sadness implies sanity, and he’s supposed to be WAY beyond all that. I wanted him grinning more, laughing manaically more, killing indiscriminately more.
The magic trick with the pencil was his best move, imo.
Batman Begins was a far better story. Bale didn’t have his voice modulated to the rediculous in it, and his acting skills were better showcased. Liked him better in the Dragon flick, Reign of Fire, though.
LOL: I’m not at all sure what they were getting at with the voice thing. I understand that those kinds of concepts are hard to approach philosophically, but when all’s said and done, we’ve just become accustomed to the notion that, for whatever reason, no-one seems to equate Clark Kent with Superman, or Peter Parker with Spidey, or Batman with Bruce Wayne (even though the most amateur of sleuths could probably work out that the Batman, with all his high-tech gadgetry, would have to be someone rich…). So making his voice all throaty and gruff serves only to add yet another barrier between the character’s personality and the audience. In a comic you simply don’t have that problem – Batman’s ‘voice’ looks the same as everyone else’s voice. And you are right – the overall effect is risible rather than effective. It comes back to something I always ask myself whenever I make choices for sound design – if I do this, will it be truer to the idea or further away?
hewhohears: The weird thing about the two ferries was that it was a complete logical non-sequitur. It was an arse-about version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (and I’m sure it was no coincidence that one of the ferries was full of ‘prisoners’). But follow me here – this is The Joker’s proposition:
Each ferry has the detonator for the other ferry’s explosives. If one of you blows up the other, the executioners get to survive. If neither of you push the button, at midnight I’ll blow up both ferries.
The thing is, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a problem of logic, not morals. For the situation that The Joker has offered up above, and thinking rationally, whatever side you are on, you should push the button as fast as you can, because logically you’re both going to be blown to bits at midnight no matter what! The only reason that the dilemma plays out differently in the film is because Batman prevents The Joker from blowing the two boats to smithereens, so we are never offered the proper perspective on this silly variation. It’s just another filmic magic trick that gets whisked up in front of us us and then whisked away before we can actually see what just happened. The film is full of those sleights-of-hand.
(And as a moral comment, then it’s just dumb and confused and irksome, because the majority of the boat full of ‘normal’ people votes to push the button and then in the end don’t, because the unlikeable and trigger-happy spokesman has a change of heart – wha? – and the boat full of crims led by the meanest sonofabitch in Christendom doesn’t throw the switch because, well, deep down they’re just all kind-hearted folks. What are we supposed to infer from that? That even the nastiest person is really cuddly and warm and fuzzy inside? Please.)
JAK: Personally I think the best kind of insanity has an implication of sadness. And I disagree about The Joker needing to be entirely mad – an instrument of such utter chaos asks for only one solution and that’s complete annihilation with no recrimination. For me, one of the best parts of the film was when The Joker was beaten up in the prison cell. There was no doubt about his madness, and yet by his action he allowed us to see the evil in others. And I felt pity for him, being the agent of that illumination.
The depth of character in The Joker was what was lacking in the film’s other protagonists. It’s like the writers spent all their time thinking about The Joker to the detriment of pretty much everybody else.
Well, I knew the time would eventually have to come – I disagree with the Rev. While I didn’t think the film was quite the classic it’s been hyped to be, I thought it was excellent.
The whole navel-gazing superhero thing isn’t a product of our times, it’s a product of the 60s when these types of superheroes started appearing. People got sick of the bright and shiny, two-dimensional Supermans and Captain Americas and wanted more complex heroes for a more complex time. Peter Parker was so interesting because he had to go through all the complexities of being an angsty young guy trying to get a girlfriend and pay the rent, all the while catching the bad guys and being vilified by the press and public for it. Batman was steeped in the dark underbelly of crime while trying to hold on to his humanity; it explored themes of vigilante justice and deeply grey areas of good and evil.
Sure, you have to suspend disbelief to a huge degree when marrying reality to fantasy, but then you do in any fantasy. The reality improves the fantasy – despite the fact we have elves and Balrogs running about in Middle Earth, an internal consistency of reality makes it ‘believable’. The point is, the fantasy is a vehicle for exploring elements of the human pysche and human experience, in a larger-than-life, mythological kind of way. You take a basic concept – heroes and villains, black-and-white, evil-and-good and then explore how life is actually all about grey areas, that nothing is what it seems, but despite all there are opportunities for true heroism and self-sacrifice.
We’re used to it now, but the concept was revolutionary when it first hit the comics. Both types of hero have been explored in the endless stream of superhero films hitting the screen – which are more interesting and memorable – the day-glo colours of ‘Batman and Robin’ or the darkness and angst of ‘Batman Begins’? I know which one I prefer.
The stories are running thin, but I try not to nitpick at the details when a film as good as The Dark Knight is so true to the spirit of the character. I’m seeing my childhood heroes up on the big screen, and while there’s a lot of bad misses (eg Fantastic Four), there’s the occasional intelligent film that hits the mark like this one.
Sorry Rev!
Haven’t seen it I may say, but hardly champing at the bit to be honest. I remember sitting through the fairly pedestrian 2nd (?) movie which introduced The Boy Wonder, who saved the circus tent from certain destruction only to look down and see the dead remains of his extremely camp trapeze act spread on the floor. I roared with laughter at this appallingly sentimental ‘tragedy’ only to receive a crack in the ribs from my companion. Yeah you guessed it, the entire theatre was eerily silent, a pin could be heard falling in Melbourne, and I was cast in the role of the evil bastard once again.
Notwistanding my immunity to Hollywood’s attempts to manipulate a Vulcan heart, I’m also a tad sceptical about Ledger. Usually when an actor dies they are immediately inducted into celestial realms of worship. Perhaps it’s particularly bad here in Australia, where for example a man like Michael Hutchence, who dies “with his falafel in his hand” in the grip of a Heath Robinson style masturbatory apparatus cannot be impugned once he has passed over.
I mean come on, the bad guy is always the best role, because it’s darkly humourous, often more entertaining, and script-wise goes where the wooden good guy can’t (despite his supposedly dark side – come on purrrlease!). Can Bruce Wayne say he’d like to ‘eat someone’s wife for dinner’ – no, yawn I think not.
So Ledger, will he match up to Jack as the Joker, not sure I need to find out, but if I were a gambling man…
Finally if Gifford liked it, well…he thought the new Indy film was “okay” as opposed to another Schpielberghhh pile of steaming…
The King
ps Sorry Pete
The voice worked fine in Batman Begins, so I think they blew it by taking it so much further. I can see why they change the voice as another component to Batman’s character is that he’s meant to instill deep fear and panic in the crims, but this time they left it in the oven too long and it was pretty laughable until you have time to get used to it.
I loved the music/sound design for the Joker though, those reed/overblown air type sounds that have all their frequencies being ripped apart, that was spot on, to match the character of man who is decaying morally.
To be honest I liked this film but it was a bit relentless and humorless. Even the Joker was a bit too disturbing at times, though he provided most of laughs. I liked they way the nihilist attitude everyone has starts to be stripped away when the people in the boats can’t bring themselves to kill each other out of self interest.
I agree with your point that making book film adaptations very realistic can mean the whole thing starts to collapse under the weight of it’s own premise because it can’t be real and the more the audience is being forced to think about what is being presented in a realistic way, you can also see how impossible or implausible it all is. Sometimes bullshit is better just being bullshit. The trick is always to get the audience to suspend their disbelief and engage with the characters and world they live in. Making escapism like the real world sort of misses the point.
I mean to say “comic book film adaptations” in my previous post.
You’ve probably already seen this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2yv8aT0UFc
Universal Head: Well, I really expected a lot more disagreement than I got, which says something I think.
I understand the concept behind the disenfranchised superheroes, but for me it only works if it actually throws some kind of illumination on the human condition, and honestly, in these films, in my opinion it doesn’t. I think back on The Dark Knight and I really don’t sympathise with Batman’s plight one little bit. I felt absolutely nothing for any of those entirely one dimensional characters, especially, as I’ve pointed out above, the ones who die. This is distinctly different from how I felt about, say, John McClane in the first Die Hard or even Sarah Connor or Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. There’s a problem with the Batman films – they are subsumed by the darkness and seriousness so much that they forget that they are not rooted in any way in reality. This is completely different from your example of elves and Balrogs in LOTR. I have no disagreement with what you say about fantasy illuminating reality – I would never argue that you can’t. As I said in the post though, if you intend to do that, then you have to abide by the rules of your fantasy and not stray from them. Batman does not obey its rules. It structures itself on an inherently implausible basis (a mad criminal who wears greasepaint; a man who dresses as a bat) but wants us to believe that the their world is populated by normal Average Joes. It doesn’t work for me. Christopher Nolan has said that ‘Batman is just an ordinary guy’ – but he’s quite explicitly NOT. If this is what Nolan truly believes, then he breaks his rules by having Batman do superhuman things like jump off the top of a skyscraper and glide on ‘bat’ wings into another building with unerring accuracy. I can’t hold both of those things in my mind. Batman can be a comic book character and do those kinds of things, or be a ‘normal’ guy and do things that are believable. But not both. It just creates an emotional disconnect.
Tell me that you cared that Rachel got blown up. Tell me that you really felt disillusioned when Batman rode off into the night, shunned by Gotham. Tell me that you felt anything when Harvey Dent threw away all he stood for and chose the path of evil. All those things were completely barren in the film for me.
I agree that the concept was revolutionary when it first appeared in the comics, and as I said, I think there is merit in a cinematic exploration of the idea, but honestly, I just didn’t feel anything for Batman in these films. And surely that is the point of such examinations of character.
King Willy: As I said, Heath Ledger is good in this. Very good. And it’s got nothing at all to do with his death, trust me. This role was well written and quite obviously the focus of the film. To the detriment of everything else in my opinion.
LOL: >>but it was a bit relentless and humorless
Yes, I agree. And I think that’s a large part of the problem. The darkness works well as a literary device, but in my opinion is far to weighty in this cinematic version.
Casey: Hahaha. Cruel, but accurate..