November will be a little hectic for me (in a fun, self-imposed way), with early-season skiing coming up, a big trip to the British Isles in the middle, my 21st birthday, and the accompanying morning-after wreckage.
Any blogging I might be able to fit in amidst all that probably wouldn't be worth your time, so I've decided to take the month off. I'll see all of you on December 1st.
About a month ago, I became curious to see how Tim Burton's Batman would compare in 2008 to The Dark Knight. Batman fell short of the expectations that hazily recalled childhood viewings had set for it, but I remained confident that its sequel, Batman Returns, also by Tim Burton, would have the haunting, phantasmagorical darkness that I'd remembered of Burton's movies.
Indeed, Batman Returns surpasses its predecessor. Burton, who was not yet 29 when Batman was released, had entered the best stage of his career by 1992, fresh off Edward Scissorhands, with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Ed Wood soon to come. Batman Returns feels more like a Burton movie than Batman did. The 1989 film, with Joker's razzle-dazzle and an assortment of superhero gadgets, played like a summer blockbuster, and it has aged like one. In Batman Returns, the set pieces are stranger, the characters are more anguished, and the mood is more somber. Its Gotham is a wintry ghost city. The trees have been frozen into twisted ice sculptures, and baroque, uninhabitable towers jut into the sky. The metropolis seems less populated than it was in Batman; the locales favored here are the sewers, an abandoned zoo, and streets covered in white, where the Batmobile makes first tracks.
The production design in Batman Returns is excellent, as long as one can get into the peculiar Gothic unreality of its aesthetic. The sets are full of lovely constructions, but all of them look synthetic. With exquisite models and rich backdrops, Batman Returns appears to have been shot on an enhanced dream version of an old studio lot, where fake snow always falls. Yet it is less dated than Batman is: Batman Returns is the product of its director, not of its decade. The vision here is distinctly Burton's, and we caught only brief glimpses of it in Batman.
This world appeals to me, but it is a visual creation, helped by Danny Elfman's score. The screenplay by Daniel Waters is actually worse than the Batman script by Sam Hamm (who gets a story credit here) and Warren Skaaren. Waters seems incapable of writing a natural exchange between his characters; the dialogue is littered with non sequiturs and pithy witlessness. Every conversation is stilted and somehow inscrutable, as if Burton had hired a new writer to pen each line, and he had only a vague idea of what had come before it.
Waters also has trouble forging compelling paths for his characters, though the movie begins well. In the opening sequence, the wealthy mother and father of a deformed infant drop their baby in a river, where he, in his bassinet, floats away, and the guilty parents run home. The river carries the child beneath the city, where a pack of penguins discovers him and raises him as one of their own. This baby becomes the Penguin (Danny DeVito), a hideous, embittered brooder bent on revenge against the world that banished him.
In the present, a corporate fat cat named Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) has hatched a plot to drain Gotham City's electrical power. When his timid secretary, Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer), gets wind of it, he pushes her out of a window. She falls many floors, hits the ground, and lies motionless. Cats emerge from a nearby alley and lick her back to life, resurrecting her as a feline femme fetale named Catwoman.
Meanwhile, the Penguin launches a mayoral bid, having blackmailed Shreck into backing his campaign, which Batman attempts to thwart. Selina Kyle begins a romance with Bruce Wayne, but she ends up working with the Penguin in an effort to kill Batman, though her motivations as a supervillainess are not entirely clear. The love affair doesn't work out, but it probably should have: These leather-clad basket cases seem destined for each other.
Each of the two primary villains shows promise, but neither lives up to his or her potential. The Penguin's tormented ghastliness is damped by the movie's dopey, implausible political satire, which removes him from the underground lair where he's at his best. Selina Kyle's story begins almost as a parody of an old movie (she's Bette Davis in The Man Who Came to Dinner), where she plays a beleaguered working girl who lives in a crummy apartment and wears glasses that lamely attempt to cover Pfeiffer's movie star glamor. But she doesn't find a nice, honest guy to rescue her from the single life. Instead, she finds a new personality for herself, and we're anxious to see what she'll do with it, but in the end she doesn't do much. Burton hints that she'll reappear in a sequel, and perhaps the character would have taken shape there, but I don't think Halle Berry's Catwoman was what he had in mind.
Michael Keaton reprises his role as Bruce Wayne, who remains more intelligent and intriguing than he became under Val Kilmer and George Clooney, but again he lacks those meaty scenes that would flesh out his eccentricities into an identifiable personality. He functions mostly as a supporting character in each of the two major plotlines.
If Burton had found the right screenwriter, he would have really gotten it right, but the studio handed the franchise to Joel Schumacher for the third and fourth installments after viewers complained about Burton's morbidity. Burton stayed on as a producer, and it's easy to see how his engaging strangeness gave way to disastrous grotesquery in the hands of a clumsier director. One cannot imagine Burton himself making Batman Forever or Batman & Robin.
Then again, one also cannot imagine him making The Dark Knight. Nolan is a better action director; his movies have a muscularity that Burton's do not. The Dark Knight, with its damaged, malignant villain, even preserves some of the weirdness of Batman Returns, but this time the weirdness touches our reality; it does not take place entirely in its director's fantasies.
Burton isn't really meant for blockbusters. His Planet of the Apes and Mars Attacks! showed that. He's best in an atmosphere of charming, unassuming oddness. For Halloween, I recommend The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Appaloosa is a Western; it is not a movie about Westerns. In this sense, it differs from the majority of modern oaters, including last year's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For this reason, I'm surprised Appaloosa made it to the big screen; traditional horse operas live on almost exclusively as made-for-TV movies, usually starring Tom Selleck and adapted from novels by Louis L'Amour and Robert B. Parker. In fact, Robert B. Parker also wrote the novel Appaloosa, which Ed Harris adapted with Robert Knott. Tom Selleck is nowhere to be found, but he might feel at home here.
When charged to review a cowboy movie, critics enjoy pointing out that the film in question is "not really a Western," by which they mean that, like Unforgiven and Dead Man, it is better than its predecessors or, like Wild Wild West and American Outlaws, it is worse. This is a reductive view of the genre (Unforgiven, though excellent, is not actually better than High Noon or Stagecoach, and Dead Man certainly is inferior), but it points to a general truth: Current Westerns are made with a mind to subvert the trappings of their forebears (the racism, the romance) or simply to escape them. Appaloosa embraces them, happily enlisting hoary cliches when they are useful. It even deploys hostile Indians as a plot device. There's no intertexual criticism here. Appaloosa's purpose is to tell a story, and it is well-told in its modest way. As director, Ed Harris adds a personal touch to his timeworn storyline, but nobody can claim that his movie is "not really a Western."
The plot is simple enough; it recalls every Wyatt Earp movie ever made. The protagonist here is Virgil Cole (Ed Harris), a gunman who, near the beginning of the movie, rides into an unfamiliar town called Appaloosa. He is accompanied by his longtime partner, Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen). In Appaloosa, a nefarious rancher named Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) has shot the City Marshal and his deputies, and now his gang runs wild in the streets, terrorizing shopkeepers and bartenders. Before long, local dignitaries hire Virgil as the new marshal, with Everett as his deputy. The two set about cleaning up Appaloosa, and eventually they arrest Bragg for murder. He is sentenced to death. Meanwhile, Virgil meets an elegant lady and falls in love with her. The lady is Allison French (Renée Zellweger), and she too is a newcomer, having recently stepped off the train here for no discernible reason. After years of roaming the West, Virgil decides to settle down with her and builds a house in Appaloosa. Naturally, however, he and Everett run into some complications while escorting Bragg to his hanging. There is a kidnapping, a getaway, and a chase. "You'll never see me hang!" Bragg boasts. "Never is a long time," Virgil replies.
Obviously, this is all very routine. We've seen these characters a million times before, and most of them haven't evolved much over the years. Virgil, like many lawmen before him, is taciturn and brutally professional. His more pensive sidekick is similarly laconic. Bragg, the crook, is suspiciously well-spoken, and the movie never gives us any cause to doubt that he is purely evil. Only Allison French departs significantly from her archetype. Fifty years ago, she'd be a kind, pious schoolmarm; here, she more resembles one of Hollywood's dissatisfied, unstable suburban housewives.
In short, Appaloosa's characters are built from old parts, but the parts have been put together correctly, and nearly every role is well-played. Ed Harris is neither as compellingly human nor as loftily mythic as John Wayne or Gary Cooper, who used underwritten parts to their advantage; still, there is a man behind the cold stare. Viggo Mortensen's performance here seems less labored than any of the others I've seen from him. Jeremy Irons has fun as the dastardly Bragg, and Timothy Spall has an amusing turn as a sputtering townsman. Zellweger, as flirty Allison, is not charming (only movie producers still expect her to be), and I wonder how bad-looking she'll have to become before Hollywood stops employing her in these roles.
Appaloosa has the elements of a shoot-em-up, but it's slower than that and has a more thoughtful air, though it doesn't seem to be thinking about much in particular. Still, it doesn't feel as though we're wallowing in junk. Appaloosa takes time to look at its characters, who become more interesting than they seem they ought to be. The relationship between Virgo and Everett is especially well-observed; these two men come to know each other thoroughly despite sharing nothing of their lives, and they've achieved a perfect partnership, where each knows his role and seems to have chosen it for himself. There are action sequences, too, and they come as abrupt, arresting bursts of movement.
I'm glad cinema has more to offer than this kind of fare, but occasionally, one wants to see a movie like Appaloosa. There was a time when Hollywood produced this sort of Western all the time; that's no longer the case, but 2007 brought 3:10 to Yuma, a greater, more ambitious version of this same brand of entertainment. "I rode straight into the sunset, heading West at an easy pace. I had a long journey ahead of me, and I saw no need to hurry," Everett intones in a concluding voiceover, as if unaware that we knew all along he'd do precisely that. I sincerely hope the sun has not set on Appaloosa.
Yeah, it's another lazy day around here. The NBA season just started!
• Tony Hillerman died on Sunday at age 83.
• Salon reviewed Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, Margaret Atwood's latest book. It sounds interesting.
• Cracked has excerpts from Miley Cyrus's autobiography.
• Footloose without Kevin Bacon? That's crazy talk! Next they'll tell us Chris Penn won't be in it!
• This movie actually sounds far worse.
High School Musical 3: Senior Year grossed $42 million over the weekend. I'll never, ever see this movie, so I won't be able to review it. But if any of The Worst Ever's readers is willing to help me out by watching this garbage, writing a literate, insightful review, and sending it to me, he or she will be generously recompensed. I offer the following award:
It's more than just an image. It's an emblem of my esteem for you. And if you win it, I'll give you my permission to post it on your website. Or, if I know you in real life, you can print it out, and I'll sign it for you. The review must be your own work! I'll know if you just copy and paste an IMDb comment, you scoundrels.
• Amazon has dealt a cruel blow to the greatest literary critic of our time.
• Lionel Shriver likes quotation marks.
• Roger Ebert reviewed a horrible indie movie even though he'd turned it off after eight minutes. Then he blogged about his decision to do this. Then he went back and watched the rest of the movie and wrote another review. And then he blogged again. It's all pretty important.
• There are problems with the Dragonball movie? Impossible!
Good God, I'm wasting my life!
I'd never heard of Kerry Katona before last night, but YouTube clips from a recent British TV interview with her have been making the rounds. Apparently, Katona is a writer, singer, and television personality. She's far more famous in England than in the United States, but whether you know her or not, the following clip is worth watching just for a laugh. Katona speaks hilariously incomprehensible British English. Medication and perhaps alcohol probably caused most of her slurring, but I also think she must be related to Brad Pitt's character in Snatch.
Compare to her Irish Traveller cousin Mickey.
Both of Oliver Stone's biopics, Nixon and W., concern American presidents whose careers seem to have sprung more from personal demons than political ideologies. Each is engaged in perpetual battle with cold, unforgiving parents and early inadequacies. Bush, however, starts out as a creature far more benign than brooding, unhappy Nixon, and he might have stayed that way, if only he'd been good at something.
In W., we see him as a personable, high-spirited jackass, who likes booze, baseball, and women. He's most at home at frat houses, bars, and barbecues, and he hasn't the diligence or ambition to hold down a job. Where would he be now if not for his father's censures, his constant reminders of his disappointment in George and preference for Jeb? Where would we be? George W. Bush has neither moral convictions nor an interest in politics. He enters the family business only as a last resort, a final stab at respectability. He doesn't know what he stands for until his advisors tell him.
The movie chronicles the majority of Bush's life, from his days at Yale through his first term in office. We follow him through his boozy, aimless years in Texas, his meeting and courtship with Laura Welch, his first, failed bid for office, his crucial religious awakening, and his father's 1988 and 1992 campaigns, which he assisted. The story is not chronological; Stone intercuts sequences involving young Bush with scenes from the White House. Periodically, we see him dreamily wandering around in the outfield of the Texas Rangers' ballpark.
Josh Brolin plays W. with close attention to the president's signature speech patterns and gestures. His performance is comic -- if it were not, he would not be Bush -- but it is not a spoof; it is a precise, skillful impersonation. He and screenwriter Stanley Weiser suggest in Bush the mind of a fourteen-year-old, capable of rudimentary deception but essentially earnest. Bush sees the political advantages of his outspoken Christianity, but he really believes in it, too.
For the most part, W. views the president not as a villain but as a dupe who, if he'd spent these last eight years anywhere but in the Oval Office, would have been fairly harmless. Its worst moments are its occasional potshots, which conveniently reposition familiar Bushisms, perhaps to appease viewers expecting an SNL skit. Stone needn't have Brolin recite Bush's dumbest lines ("Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?") to convince us of our president's density, and because we know they've been uprooted, they seem like unfair attacks, even though their new settings actually do nothing to misrepresent them or to divorce them from some previously logical contexts.
Stone's portraits of the rest of Bush's associates vary in believability, depth, and sympathy. He's kind, for example, to Laura Bush, whom we meet as a liberal librarian whose love for W. sometimes seems illogical even to her, though, out of loyalty, she sticks by him. Stone assigns the part to Elizabeth Banks, an actress too pretty for the role, especially in the later scenes, when, nearly three decades after her marriage, she doesn't appear to have aged a bit.
George H.W. Bush is a cold, inexpressive patriarch, but Stone allows him a certain dignity and intelligence. James Cromwell has perhaps too formidable a screen presence, with his stentorian bark and imposing height (6'7"), to play our relatively bumbling 41st president. Likewise, Jeffrey Wright is is captivating in a way that the real Colin Powell, written here as a principled man put in too difficult a situation, is not, but his performance is so gripping that we must forgive this. Thandie Newton, usually very attractive, twists and pinches her face into a convincing Condoleezza Rice, and she must really have it in for her, lending Rice a bizarrely mannered voice that makes Sarah Palin's seem appealing. Meanwhile, Ellen Burstyn is as fearsomely icy as we must suspect Barbara Bush to be in her private life, and Toby Jones is appropriately creepy as Karl Rove. Richard Dreyfuss also stands out as a serpentine Dick Cheney, the evil mastermind of the bunch. Of all the members of Bush's administration, Cheney here seems most responsible for the crimes of the past eight years.
I enjoyed watching this cast, and I enjoyed the movie as a whole; it is a competent depiction of our 43rd president and, as such, may be useful for future generations. At times, it gives the impression of being overlong, but upon reflection I'm struck by how much Stone left out. The 2000 campaign and the Florida recount are absent; Al Gore makes no appearance. Nor does John Kerry (except in a brief, unflattering moment of real footage), since W. stops short of the 2004 election and the second term, with Hurricane Katrina and the economic crisis of 2008. Stone concentrates on the planning and execution of the Iraq War, and this is fascinating, but I would have liked to see more.
W. is also surprisingly talky, and much of it has the air of a stage play more than the headlong cinematic rush for which Oliver Stone used to be known. It is not dull, but it's far more subdued than Nixon was. Consequently, it's a smaller achievement. Nixon was riskier; it was so overblown and doomy that it verged on camp. But the risk paid off, and it had instead a horrible grandeur that made it more than just a biopic. W. is not so bold, and for this reason I don't think it quite gets to the heart of the gruesome comedy of Bush's White House. W. is a sensible play-by-play, and it has insightful moments, but I'm not sure it's fully up to the task of addressing the baffling catastrophe on our hands -- the enraging sanctimony and lethal incompetence of an administration run by a simple man who means well. W. would like to be The Queen, but what we need is an apocalyptic farce. A decade and a half ago, Oliver Stone was the man for the job.
