THE OBLIGATORY DARK KNIGHT RISES POST

It's about Bat-time for some Bat-links, y'all:

1) Here are my collected reviews of every Batman movie up to and including The Dark Knight at Tor.com.

2) My non-spoiler review of The Dark Knight Rises, which says pretty much all I've got to say; you want to fight about particular elements in it that “don't make sense,” I'm not your guy. Besides, I already ripped whiny bullshit fan reactions the other day.

3) My piece in The Atlantic about where both Christopher Nolan and Batman stand at present.

Happy Monday, kids!

A FEW WORDS ABOUT HARRY KNOWLES

The gentleman in question

(Like a lot of bloggers, unencumbered by the professional obligation to churn out immediate responses to the brutal mass murder in Colorado Friday midnight, I'm prefacing this post by saying this was supposed to go up Friday morning. When I woke up and turned on my computer, I saw, yeah, maybe this isn't the best time to rant about Harry Knowles. It was a time for contemplation for many, and for me a full day of sitting around stunned at what that malignant little fuck—I'm not giving him the satisfaction of saying his name; he has no name—did. Anyway, I don't really have anything to contribute to that discussion beyond the anger and sadness so many others share, intensified in this particular case because movie theaters are a place I've felt safe and free my whole life, especially in times when I felt in danger or trapped. I basically co-sign everything my good friend Filmi Girl says in the introduction to this post, so check that out, then come back, and watch the below video to transition back into our completely unrelated regularly scheduled programming.)



So, earlier this week, before anyone other than critics and a few lucky bloggers (and people like me who aren't quite as fancy as the former just yet but still a little fancier than the latter) had had a chance to see The Dark Knight Rises, Harry Knowles, founder of Ain't It Cool News, and for better or worse the ur-Internet movie blogger, spoiled the sweet living fuck out of it. While that's a little shitty, Mr. Knowles did admittedly preface everything with a spoiler alert, so it's not as bad as it could be. What is, and what makes this more notable than just internecine nerd grumping, is the way in which Knowles registers his “[p]rofound disappointment.” It's a stunningly lousy piece of criticism, fodder for everyone who would join Kevin Smith's recent crusade against not only critics themselves, but the entire form.

Whether or not Knowles' piece was meant as a “formal” review or not is a bit beside the point. Ain't It Cool is, by virtue of having been around the Internet practically since before civilians even knew what computers were, an institution. Its editorial perspective is right there on its sleeve, with its heart: ain't movies cool? I'm hardly in a position to disagree. In principle I'm right there with them. I love movies with a fierce intensity. Movies can be about anything and everything, so to love movies is to love life itself, at a certain point. On the other hand, loving cinema does not mean one loves all movies. Some are better than others.

I would submit that if the way in which your love of movies manifests itself is in the desire to write about them, you owe it to yourself and other movie lovers to at least try to get at what a movie is, rather than focusing on your own personal reaction to it to the exclusion of all other things. Criticism is not a simple matter of “I liked it” or “I didn't like it.” A big part of it is considering factors outside the self; while ultimately purely objective observation is always going to be impossible because the observer is part of the observation, it's incumbent on the observer to do the best s/he can. The best parts of oneself—knowledge, wisdom, and empathy—are the best tools of observation.

Where Knowles fucks up in that Dark Knight Rises piece, and the entire experience of watching the movie itself, from the sound of things, is in that inability to step even an inch outside himself and the Dark Knight Rises screenplay he'd already written in his head. (He's no stranger to reading the wrong script, if you'll recall his embarrassing adventures with that fake Prometheus script back in April.) Reading his reaction to the movie (since calling it a “review” is a bit much), everything that pissed him off relates to a choice Christopher (and brother Jonathan) Nolan made either in transposing characters from the comics into the very different realm of cinema, or in the effects of those characters' action in a world they, the Nolan brothers, not Harry Knowles, created.

Among those effects is something that relates to a larger discussion of fandom and sexism that's come to a bit of a boil this year. In the case of both this summer's previous mega-blockbuster superhero movies, The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man, women critics were subjected to shit like “Stick with rom-coms, bitch” for weighing in with anything other than adulation. In gaming there was the whole “getting the player to identify with Lara Croft by her getting almost-raped” crap and that woman's Kickstarter to fund a study of sexism in gaming that led to a deluge of threats of rape and a Flash game where the player could punch her in the face. Given this context, a discussion that has been unavoidable in fandom circles for months, it's a sign of great negligence that Knowles would register the following complaint (bolded emphasis mine, not his; shitty writing his, not mine):

“It is just at this stage that the film loses all sense of urgency. I mean, you have a city with a strange respirator men with an army of thugs and every hardened criminal in the city – and it doesn’t end up looking like Old Detroit from ROBOCOP? I mean – there’s 1000s armed bad guys and the city isn’t being raped and pillaged. Instead they set up courts to make people walk on ice?”

Yes, Harry, there are thousands of armed bad guys and the city isn't being raped and pillaged. Perhaps Christopher and Jonathan Nolan do not share your lazy conflation of rape and pillage with dramatic urgency. Perhaps they also share a frame of reference not entirely derived from other movies with no aesthetic, philosophical, or any other connection other than being movies. If anything, the absence of rape and pillage in this case could be interpreted as a) Bane not being an anarchist, because he's not an anarchist, and b) a sign to pay attention because (pardon the overly literal reading) something's happening, and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Knowles?

I should clarify that accusing Harry Knowles of rape advocacy based on the above quote would be inaccurate. But it's indicative of a fundamental lack of taking a moment to think about other people and how they might think or feel, which is the same fundamental problem with his entire reaction. The near-mantra which the repetitions of “bullshit” become is derived almost entirely from the movie's interpretation of the comics being different from Knowles'. There is, I hate to break it to him, no one set-in-stone interpretation of the comics, which are, as a writer I rather like pointed out in The Atlantic recently, the product of many different authors and the different perspectives each brought to the material. Then, there are things such as Bane being “no longer South American,” which is an assumption based on the absence of it being spelled out, and not something there's any evidentiary basis to state as anything other than an assumption. And, even if he's not, not to be mean or anything, but who gives a fuck? If Knowles had liked the movie (on whatever squishy inarticulately-conveyed basis) he certainly wouldn't have.

While we're in an interrogative mood, another “who gives a fuck?” subject is Harry Knowles himself, as in “why should we give a fuck what he has to say?” His is not an a priori irrelevant voice. However irritating he's become both online and in Austin (and holy shit, if you want to hear invective, just wind Austin critic types up with a question about the guy and watch them go), and however many writers have come along who are better at doing what he does than he is (Ain't It Cool is home to some fine ones, as well as some not so fine), online movie and fandom discourse is what it is to a significant degree due to Harry Knowles' influence. And a lot of people still read Ain't It Cool. So when he hops on his computer the day before one of the biggest geek movies of the year and writes something this stupid, it's irritating.

It's also bad for criticism in general. I haven't had much to say about Kevin Smith's ridiculous and weird anti-critic tirades (in keeping with the “it's not always about me” theme here, Scott Weinberg basically nails the whole thing in this piece), but Smith and Harry Knowles are essentially on the same page on this subject. Their (apparent) weird mix of unquantifiable emotion, dogmatic certitude, and the utter refusal to address either is one of the most annoying things about movie geekery. Asking why something is “awesome” or “sucks,” or having to explain, does not in any way cheapen the experience of a movie, and in a lot of cases enriches it. Getting deeper on a movie you liked and discovering that, in fact, there are some things wrong with it doesn't mean the subjective, emotional experience of liking it is any less valid. All it means is that the movie in question did some things well and other things not so well. One can like a “bad” movie and not enjoy a “good” movie. No matter what the case, understanding is a net good.

Throwing stones at nerds, admittedly, will lead to a lot of shit getting broken in my glass house (which, because I'm a nerd, is a 1:1 scale replica of Dr. Manhattan's Martian palace in Watchmen). But, in terms of the discussion at hand, I find it particularly grating when unexamined feelings are presented as having any kind of relevance, and when the process of examination is dismissed as either boring or the occupation of sour-grapes killjoy assholes. I also think voices with large audiences of listeners should endeavor to say things of meaning and value.

Of, course, that might just be a by-product of my remembering that once upon a time, nerds were supposed to be smart.

WHAT THE OSCARS CAN LEARN FROM THE MTV MOVIE AWARDS

Elizabeth Banks getting carried offstage by an actor playing a stripper playing a fireman; aka winning at life

I know you all looked at the title of this post and went “What the fuck, dude, what are you, writing for Slate now?” If it's any reassurance, I'm not suggesting stupid shit like “the Academy needs to be more populist in its selections” because Oscar movies are certainly not a representation of the artistic elite in cinema; Oscar movies are just as much comfort food as the stuff that wins MTV Awards, just for the palates of people who've graduated from high school. Also, for all everybody's griping about inevitability, let us remember, the Oscars did give Best Picture to a black-and-white French movie with almost no dialogue this year, and whatever you thought of it, that is something. But let's not revisit that whole fuckin mess again. On to lessons:


1—Lighten up, Francis

Look, art is important. It's a prism through which the great mysteries of life can be contemplated, it gives us language to describe the exalted, and it's as old as human beings themselves, suggesting that it's a fundamental part of our character as a species. Cinema is art. But the Academy doesn't have anything to do with art, and the fact that they pretend to when at least three out of every five years shit happens like The King's Speech beating The Social Network or Crash beating Brokeback Mountain or Slumdog Millionaire running unopposed or Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction or Ordinary People beating Raging Bull or Rocky beating Network/All The President's Men/Taxi Driver/Bound For Glory is absurd. To clarify: this isn't about my personal taste. In every single one of those cases, the ambitious picture that dares to be dark (and, in every case except the Rocky one, is the only one that people still actually watch) lost to the reassuring, safe, forgettable picture. The Academy awards artistic achievement by accident, not by design.

So, as long as they're going to be kind of silly and dick over great filmmaking, why not let their hair down and embrace the silliness? Russell Brand is hit or miss as a stand-up—a little of his I'm-above-this breeziness and faux-edgy political humor that's designed to seem to the audience like he thinks it's going over their heads but is really supposed to flatter them for “getting” the “joke” goes a long way—but his hosting was in another fucking galaxy from Billy Crystal's this year because some of his jokes actually worked. Not to mention, one of Russell Brand's biggest strengths in a context as silly as an awards show is the way his perpetually sighing vocal delivery reminds everyone that what's going on is not serious. Because it's not.


2—Categories like “Best Kiss” and “Best Fight” are not stupid, they're actually great

A continuation of point 1. These categories are the greatest strength of the MTV Movie Awards, after its realization of its own existential absurdity. Considering that the Oscars are—whether they admit it or not—about what makes movies fun rather than great, why not have Best Kiss? Or Best Fight (maybe expanded to Best Ownage Sequence to allow car chases and shit as well)? Or Best Villain?

This isn't about getting more people to watch the Oscar telecast, because fuck that (and in any case the MTV Movie Awards ratings were down almost 30% this year, making it a less-than-ideal commercial model). I'm just saying, if they gave out Best Fight right after the dead people montage and then the clips of the nominees are things like Iko Uwais ramming a fluorescent light bulb into a dude's throat, that would be awesome.


3—Wiz Khalifa and The Black Keys showing up for no apparent reason

If you need to make it sound more pretentious call it the “Luis Buñuel Memorial Appreciation For The Stochastic and Ridiculous Nature Of Existence.” Also, the performance the Keys did with Lifetime Achievement Award winner Johnny Depp (who, it should be noted, looked like he was having infinitely more fun than he does whenever he shows up to lose an Oscar) is something the Oscars should do: if someone gets a lifetime achievement award for being an awesome performer, they should have to perform. The fact that Johnny sat in with the Keys on guitar and proved that, while he looks perfect as a rock 'n' roll guitarist, he kinda sounds like shit is even better: the performance should have to have a degree of difficulty increase. Make Francis Ford Coppola juggle. The what-the-fuck quotient would actually make that shit interesting.


4—The MTV Movie Awards are only two hours long

This is tricky for the Oscars, because the best speeches are ALWAYS for the awards “no one cares about” (implying, falsely, that anyone gives any appreciable degree more of a fuck more about Best Actor and Director; half the audience is watching for the dresses and the other half's attention is drifting toward the blog posts they're drafting about what bullshit it is that Terrence Malick doesn't have more Oscars that William Wyler). But dudes, you need to tighten. Not shorten. Just only put in what needs to be there. The fact that some fuckfaces at MTV who give their Best Picture award to Twilight are doing a better job than you should make you jump out the fucking window in shame.


5—Show clips from upcoming releases

So, to explain: I watched the MTV Movie Awards instead of the Game of Thrones season finale because I was lured with beer and a post-show trip up to a roof deck and it was gorgeous out Sunday night. And I have no regrets, because the company was great and I was able to catch GoT first thing the next morning online. I already forget who won what except for Kristen Stewart earning the nickname “Pinner” after the variety of joint, because pinners are skinny, white, and full of weed, and so is she (I'm not judging, I think she's great, I'm just saying, girlfriend was fuckin hiiiiiiigh). But one thing I do remember is the coming attractions.

They debuted the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I don't really care about except I hope it does well so Emma Watson gets her post-Hermione career off to a good start. And, later, they made a gigantic hullafuckinbaloo about an EXCLUSIVE NEVER-BEFORE SEEN clip from The Dark Knight Rises. Which I knew wasn't going to be anything really new but still, I can't lie, I got excited. And went ahead and spent a couple minutes speculating about the structure and how Anne Hathaway figured into things. So, you know mission accomplished.

It sounds like (and sometimes is) conceding the lack of interest in the history of movies to advise the Oscars to stop the all-necrophilia-all-the-time act and focus on the present and future, but there's a way to do it right. First, acknowledge past, present, and future as one, rather than just incessantly venerating the past, and all too often the wrong parts of the past. So, yeah, look back. Then there are the awards themselves, which acknowledge the present sufficiently. But seriously, what the hell's wrong with being like “movies are still a vital, thriving thing, and here's what we've got in store”? Nothing. Don't hard sell it up too much, but a trailer or two wouldn't do any harm, especially when presented the way the MTV Movie Awards did, bringing out Christopher Nolan to a thunderous ovation—seriously, a director getting that kind of reception? Kinda cool—to say a few opaque words before unveiling the clip. Most of it was stuff we've seen before, with the exception of a little dialogue between Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but hey.


Now, the Oscars aren't in such dire shape that they really need fixing. They are what they are. And heaven knows taking too many pages out of the book of an entity that hails fucking Twilight as any kind of superlative is problematic. But none of these suggestions would hurt. At all. Especially the one about lightening the fuck up, which really is the one from which the other four derive. Silliness is a virtue, and so is self-awareness, Oscar.

BATMAN WEEK: A LOOK BACK

All my Batman reviews are now up in all their glory over at Tor.com:

1) The 1940s serials.

2) The 1966 Batman.

3) The 1989 Batman.

4) Batman Returns.

5) Batman Forever.

6) Batman & Robin.

7) Batman Begins.

8) The Dark Knight.

There you go. The reviews you deserve, and they are the ones you need right now. So motherfuck me for my abrasive opinions, because I can take it. Because I'm not your hero. A not-so-silent guardian. An extremely unwatchful guardian. A Foul-Mouthed Blogger.

SINCE YOU'VE BEEN GONE

Well it ain't half been a while, huh? Let's catch up: since the last post, I undertook the massive . . . undertaking . . . (coughcough) of reviewing every single Batman movie ever made for Tor. It was interesting, starting with the 1943 and 1949 serials, then moving to the Adam West/Burt Ward “holy kitschy 60s homoerotic silliness, Batman!” incarnation, then to Tim Burton, then to Joel fucking assnuts Schumacher—research revealed that he spent the whole second movie (probably) fucked up out of his head and (verifiably) screaming shit into a megaphone about not taking anything too seriously, verifying my most wild exaggerations—and then to the Extremely Serious And Fraught With Portent version brought to us by Christopher Nolan (who sure is good at casting: Anne Hathaway as Catwoman is going to be straight uncut meeeeeow). Basically, after that whole fuckin' thing was done I needed to get the fuck out of Batman world and into something wholly other.

Enter my buddy Abe, whose contagious Bollywood evangelism has led to me being that dickhead in the front pew who doesn't really know what's going on but fucking FEELS THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD. Starting a few months ago with Endhiran (which wasn't a Bollywood movie but it had Indian people in it and was a good gateway drug for me because it was really fucking expensive and had a whole lot of trippy FX) and continuing with a recent outing to see Tees Maar Khan—the subject of a splendidly popular post—I'm starting to really dig the shit out of Indian movies, because they understand a couple things that we kinda lost here in America:

(1) Movie stars are important. The guy needs to be awesome and the girl needs to be hot and that's not fucking negotiable.
(2) Stylized acting fucking rules
(3) Singing and dancing similarly fucking rules
(4) It's a movie. It's meant to be enjoyed.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what I've been saying all this time in between the cursing and the Schwarzenegger advocacy? It's a match made in geek heaven.

So, less than an hour after finishing up the Batman pieces, I hopped into the shower and on the subway and, with the Tees Maar Khan crew, took in a Bollywood DVD double feature. The first picture we saw was called Om Shanti Om, by TMK director Farah Khan. The best way I can describe Om Shanti Om is that it's about everything, and everyone is in it; neither of those is all that much of an exaggeration.

The hero is Shahrukh Khan, a man who gives you your money's worth (and who's damn near a billionaire in US bux just from acting, which is seriously badass in its own way), playing two roles. Kind of. When the picture starts out, SRK is Om, a “junior artist” (read: bit player) in the 70s who dreams of stardom and romancing Shanti, the staggeringly beautiful movie star of his dreams (Deepika Padukone, making her Hindi debut, which surprised the shit out of me, because girlfriend has movie star written all up and down her). A whole bunch of wonderful, completely non-naturalistic romantic stuff happens and it looks like Shanti likes Om back . . . only to have Om discover that Shanti is secretly married to Mukesh (Arjun Rampal), the jerkoff who's producing the movie! (Which, by the way, is called Om Shanti Om; Farah Khan is basically sitting there at the stove with a big old pot of meta saying “Oh, no, sweetie, you're so thin, you need more, you're just wasting away, have more meta, it's good for you” for this whole picture)

Om is heartbroken, because he overhears Shanti tearfully telling Mukesh she just wants their marriage to be public, forget the damage to her career (different culture, different rules; not being single would seriously fuck things up for her, but that's love for you). Mukesh flips out and, in a scene that raises the bar for villainy to Himalayan heights, totally tells Shanti that he's going to marry her on the set of the movie, and right when she gets all excited, he goes, “Actually, no, I think I'll burn you alive.” And he has his big muscle dudes guard the entrance to make sure she doesn't get out. Om, motivated by true love, makes a damn fine effort to get in and save her, but Mukesh's dudes beat the shit out of him, and with the wasted time, Shanti dies in the fire, and Om dies in the hospital. Right after Om dies, the wife of movie star Rajesh Kapoor (Javed Sheikh; also, as I understand it, “Rajesh Kapoor” is sort of like if the guy was named “Jack Stone” or something in an American movie, like a real generic “movie star” name), who hit Om with his car on the way to the hospital, gives birth. Which leads to them naming the baby Om.

Jump ahead thirty years to the present day. Om Kapoor (also, of course, played by Shahrukh Khan) is a spoiled, shallow, puer aeternus fuckhead nepotistic brat, totally career-minded in his stardom. He's starring in a movie where he's playing a blind, deaf, and dumb guy in a wheelchair, but he insists on all kinds of rewrites, that lead inexorably to this magnificence ending up in the movie:



That bit at the end, where SRK starts freaking out? It's because he's afraid of fire. Why is he afraid of fire? Because . . . HE'S THE REINCARNATION OF THE OM FROM PART ONE! Boo ya motherfucker, welcome to India. If you don't recognize how rad this is, there is no reaching you.

Om Kapoor gradually gets less and less douchey as more of Old Om seeps in, to the point where he's almost completely Old Om, to the point of reuniting with Old Om's Old Mom and Old Childhood Chum. And—this is the best part—launching a jaw-droppingly elaborate revenge scheme against Mukesh, who's spent the last 30 years in Hollywood and now calls himself Mike and speaks almost exclusively English. This gives SRK the chance to do a fucking splendid vacantly Californian airhead accent when busting “Mike”s balls.

The revenge scheme centers around a remake of Om Shanti Om, on the original set, which has been considered “cursed” since the fire. Om takes advantage of his industry cachet to get a big star to play Shanti, only he's planning to find someone who looks exactly like the old Shanti to splice into the dailies to freak “Mike” out and drive him insane (something like that, at any rate), and lo and behold he finds Sandy (also played by Deepika Padukone, conveniently), a gum-chewing, clumsy bubblehead who, wouldn'tcha know, is a dead ringer for Shanti! PerFECtion!

Events converge. Somewhere in all of this there's a party scene where literally almost everyone who's been famous in Bollywood in the last thirty years pops in to say what's up:

All hot girls put your hands up and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!
All cool boys come on make some noise and say
Ommmmmmmmmmmmm Shaaaaaaaanti Om!

Goddamn that's catchy.

Then there's this big awards show parody thing where everybody else who's famous in India shows up (in which Akshay Kumar literalizes a joke I made a few months ago about Liam Neeson in Taken and actually machine guns a bunch of guys with his dick). And then the actual movie starts back up and there's more singing and dancing and eventually, Om is the instrument of ghost Shanti's revenge on Mukesh. The end. Standing ovation.

Om Shanti Om is feverishly ambitious, and is every movie ever made. A point made in the intro to Filmi Girl's excellent “Bollywood For Beginners” series that made me realize why Bollywood makes perfect sense to me: it's an industry as old as Hollywood, evolving in direct, completely separate, parallel. If you're able to carry the one, so to speak, watching a Bollywood movie shouldn't be that difficult. Cinema vocabulary is universal, and as long as you bear in mind that what appears to be tonal inconsistency to a cinematically monolingual Westerner is actually on purpose because it's the most popular style in India (the masala picture, so called because the mix of styles is like the mixture of spices in Indian cooking). So, given all that, it makes sense that even though I haven't seen most of the specific movies Om Shanti Om might be referencing (whole subplots might have flown over my head) I know movies, so it makes perfect sense on that level. Also, Farah Khan is awesome, so there's that.

Of course, after the mind-blowing intense experience of the totality of cinema that is Om Shanti Om, we were totally gonna watch something else. Abe got out a bunch of DVDs and was like “okay, I've got this, it's a little weird, I've got this, which is something something, and this one has Salman Khan.” No-brainer, we're going with Salman Khan.

Non-initiates might not see the absolute logic of this decision, so I'll explain: Salman Khan rules. If that's still not enough explanation, let's try the opening of Wanted (no relation to the stupid, excessively-pleased-with-itself McAvoy/Jolie thing). We open, eccentrically, at a women's kickboxing match, where a badass gangster type takes a call wherein it's explained that he has to come back to Mumbai at once. Some guy tips someone off that the badass gangster type is on his way back to Mumbai, and the badass gangster type cuts the guy's throat and leaves him to bleed to death in public. We then flash back to Mumbai a couple months before, where due to circumstances that presumably include suicidal impulses, a warehouse full of guys decide to antagonize Salman Khan. He proceeds, in Statham-esque fashion, to fuck each and every one of them up with extreme prejudice. But the capper is that after he owns the living fuck out of every single henchman within a five mile radius, Salman Khan stops the movie to sing a song about how awesome he is.



That's swagger, my friends. (Side note: I love how in every single Bollywood movie I've been watching lately, Anil Kapoor shows up with a shit-eating grin on his face to hang out for a dance number; that guy must be having a lot of fun) The rest of the picture alternates between Salman Khan getting goofy over the lovely Ayesha Takia (though the way he neurotically fucks with her heart after it becomes clear she likes him back is a little weird, but hey, weird is better than boring) and owning the bejesus out of the entire Mumbai criminal underworld, with a few not bad songs, a whole lot of tonal inconsistency (I don't mean that as a critique, it's just the way these pictures are; as Abe, an avowed Bollywood lover, put it: “Tonal inconsisency, thy name is Bollywood”) and, at approximately where the third act break would be in an American movie, one motherfucker of a plot twist.

Turns out Salman Khan, badass criminal, killer of many men, lover of many women . . . is an undercover cop. And though there's been no apparent mention of it the whole picture, his girlfriend's yoga teacher is not only an ex-cop but his dad. This is the point when Wanted stops fucking around and says, “You want ownage? Okay, here you go.” The gangster from the first scene is summoned back to Mumbai to stop Salman Khan from owning everybody (hey, they wouldn't be bad guys if they weren't fucking stupid) and makes the horrible mistake of killing Salman Khan's dad. Before he checks out, though, Papa Khan out-Dennis Hoppers Dennis Hopper and reminds the baddie that he ain't no motherfuckin Christopher Walken by laying shit out for him: My son is going to find you and fuck you up. Which is hardly a surprise at this point, it's like telling someone “Oh yeah the sun's going to rise in the east and set in the west tomorrow,” but the way he lays it out is just badass. I wish I could find the exact quote, but take my word for it, it rules.

Following his father's murder, Salman Khan openly reveals his policeman status and has the corrupt rapist shitbag cop on the bad guy's payroll take him out to the Final Action Sequence Warehouse. To set the tone, Salman Khan decides to jump out of the moving police car, spin in midair, and start walking up a flight of stairs in one motion for no reason whatsoever aside from sheer swagger. About twenty henchmen deaths in a row consecutively win “most stylishly and brutally violent henchman death of all time.” At a crucial point, Salman Khan removes his shirt by basically flexing his pecs. This lead to the following conversation:

Female friend: You know, not to be a girl, but that's why his package is kind of small. All those steroids, doesn't do well for you there.
Me: Yeah, but metaphysically, he's packing serious heat.
Female friend: Yes, metaphysically, that's true.

Because if they had steroid testing in movies, SK would be in some trouble. On the other hand, American action movies were awesome when the heroes were all on steroids and haven't quite been the same since (just like baseball).

By the time he gets to the main baddie and the rapist corrupt cop, Salman Khan is so intense the screen vibrates when the director cuts to his reaction shots. No shit, there's like eight shots in a row where they cut back to Salman Khan and the whole movie goes BWOMWOMWOMWOMWOM for a couple seconds. Final ownage is dealt. Fin.

Sure, Wanted's a little long (about two hours and forty minutes). Sure it'd be almost an hour shorter if it was made in America (or England or Europe or wherever) with Jason Statham. But if you're seriously sitting there whining about that shit you have no soul. Consider that extra hour an extra hour you get watching Salman Khan swagger, watching Ayesha Takia's smile (and, though I'm not a fake tit guy, hers are kind of spectacular), and all those songs. More on my nascent Bollywood fandom as it unfolds.


In other news, playoff football and my Tor duties kept me from doing up a Golden Globes post. The republic will not collapse. I had planned to do some snarky shit about the bribery scandal as a preview, but time didn't permit. Afterwards, the only thing worth writing about was Ricky Gervais' hosting, which has been written to death since then, so I won't pile on too much except to say this: what Ricky did out there was straight up Friars Club style, which has been around forever and is an institution in comedy. People were whining about him being mean, being a dick, so on and so forth, but seriously. If I was nominated for something and Ricky made fun of my weight, substance abuse, frequently gender-indiscriminate crushes, or foul mouth, I wouldn't be thrilled but I wouldn't whine my balls off about it like everyone there. Robert Downey Jr. makes a crack about shit being “mean-spirited” before doing a bit where he pretends to have shtupped all the Best Actress nominees? No. The spirit is one and the same, dude, you just got away with it because all five of them actually would fuck you given the chance (and when applicable, a waiver from her husband/significant other). Both jokes are in-bounds. Lighten up.

So that basically brings us up to today. I'm back on my regular irregular schedule, and have a couple things in store for you this week, including an in-depth look at the Lethal Weapon series in honor of Warner Bros' craven, avaricious announcement that they plan to reboot the series. So stay tuned.

One last note: next weekend, a project in which I had the privilege of being asked to take part is being unveiled: Piper McKenzie's Dainty Cadaver! Everyone in the NYC area is advised to come by and behold its majesty, and everyone not in NYC is advised to get your plane ticket now. Check out this “interview” about the play. Happy Sunday, y'all!

A PRESTIGIOUS MEMENTO FROM THE INSOMNIAC KNIGHT

As a student of the human condition—with a specialty in the more retarded aspects thereof—I spend time lurking various internet fora. The less essential the subject, the more entertaining the forum. As much as I love movies and am consumed by them, I will grant that there are more important things in the world. You'd never get that concession out of your average imdb forum regular.

Matters of life and death are discussed on imdb, thousands of times a minute. Whether The Shawshank Redemption, The Dark Knight, or Avatar is the greatest movie ever made. Multiple, endless threads entitled “Quentin Tarantino: Does He Steal or Pay Homage?” And, most importantly for what I'm leading up to talking about, everyone's “My top 5 directors” list. The greatest thing about these lists is that a good 90% of them consist of the same five directors in various order, and if you relied exclusively on imdb for your assessment of who was who in movies, it would not be difficult to come away with the impression that the following five men are the only people who've ever directed a movie:

Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
David Lynch
David Fincher
Christopher Nolan

Not a bad group of directors, by any reckoning. The wallpaper on my desktop is a self-portrait Stanley Kubrick took at the age of 16, so you won't get me to knock Kubrick (“misanthropic” and “fucking Martian” are terms of endearment.)


Kurosawa I've never much liked, but for subjective reasons—his importance to the cinematic canon is indisputable (though I do have my doubts as to how many of the 16 year old Andrew Sarris manqués on imdb have actually seen his pictures; his name is impressive to drop, especially by a 16 year old against another 16 year old).

David Lynch is fuckin' great, but he's so weird that you can't compare him to anybody else. Maybe Buñuel, but even Buñuel made more sense than Lost Highway or Mulholland Dr.

David Fincher is probably his generation's premier visual stylist, but every now and then (lookin' at you, Panic Room, stop trying to hide) he gets bushwacked by a shitty/mundane script. The 16 year old fanboys, on the other hand, recommend David Fincher for literally every single unoccupied directing job in the studio system. The Fantastic Four? Oh, Fincher should direct. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants? Gah, you're even debating this? Hire Fincher! “Man, you know, WALL-E would have been so much better if David Fincher had directed it.” Still, as ridiculous as some of that shit can get (“Dude, Gandhi would have been so dope if Fincher had directed it, bro”) and as much as I stupidly sometimes blame David Fincher himself for the esteem in which 16 year old retards hold him, there's no getting around the fact that he directed Se7en. He directed Fight Club. He directed Zodiac. Aside from the clamoring of high-pitched voices demanding that David Fincher direct a remake of Lassie, he deserves respect, and his place among his generation's elite directors.

And so we come to Christopher Nolan, who by virtue of directing Batman Begins and The Dark Knight has ensured that no white male between the ages of 12 and 35 will ever need Viagra again. Well, except me. Not that I need Viagra (not when one can freeze frame that shot in The Player where Gina Gershon is wearing glasses and a business suit). But I don't get as excited about the comic book movies as most people seem to, because my favorite comics (golden age Heavy Metal, Watchmen, Maus, Transmetropolitan, et al) are unfilmable. As uncool as it is to say these days, I don't consider the gay Adam West Batman to be any kind of crime against humanity (and how gay could it be with Julie Newmar in that catsuit, people?) Sure, The Dark Knight Returns is great, The Killing Joke is brilliantly disturbing and a masterful artistic achievement. Yaaaawwwwwwwn.

The other major result of Nolan's forays into comic book hagiography is his “A CHALLENGER APPEARS” style advent in the middle of discussions about whether David Fincher should direct a remake of She's All That. “LOL you're retarded, Christopher Nolan would be much better and he should cast Christian Bale as Freddy Prinze, Jr.” “STFU you *beep* retard, ONLY DAVID FINCHER CAN DIRECT THE REMAKE OF SHE'S ALL THAT.” (Note, the fact that you can't curse in an imdb forum leads to hilarious teenage Internet Tough Guy swagger-fest posts with dozens of *beep*s peppered throughout.)

But, you may ask, sure these dumbasses who annoy you think that he and David Fincher are the only directors currently working within the Hollywood system, the issue is, can Christopher Nolan actually direct? By the (very low) standards of the Batman series thus far, sure he can. Christopher Nolan is as superior to Joel Schumacher as the Yankees are to my intramural softball team at Bard where I used to have to swing the bat one-handed so I wouldn't spill my beer. He is also—and yes, I am going there—a clear superior to Tim Burton, who is probably the most overrated living director (seriously, keep Ed Wood—which is only marred by the presence of the hideous Sarah Jessica Parker—and toss the whole fucking rest of his career).

But, you may point out, with increasing annoyance that I still haven't gotten to the fucking point yet, just because he's better than Joel Schumacher—he of the Mr. Magoo camera eye—and the lucky bastard who gets to fuck Helena Bonham Carter, that I haven't yet answered the long-delayed thesis topic of this post: CAN CHRISTOPHER NOLAN DIRECT? Let's take a look at the ol' curriculum vitae:


Following (1998)

Not a bad first feature, and very stylish considering the non-existent budget. Gained some cachet when everyone was blowing each other about Memento when the hipper-than-thou resorted to their standard “you only like x because it's popular” gambit and started telling everyone Following was so much better than Memento, which was generic mainstream crap just because it had actors you'd seen before. As a result, a lot of pissed-off Memento fans went in to Following without the generous, expansive, patient attitude you need to watch experimental films. Ultimately, the problem with Following is that it's just interesting enough to keep you watching, but not deep enough to have any kind of satisfying totality. Still, for a first time out with no money, not bad at all.







Memento (2000)

Clever is not a four-letter word, but it was treated that way by a lot of people who thought this was too gimmicky. Sure it was self-consciously clever. Sure the backwards structure was a gimmick. The structure was neither as lame as the naysayers said or as earth-shatteringly profound as the furiously fapping fanboys insist to this day. Me? I thought Memento was just a damn fine night of entertainment. Guy Pearce shoots Joe Pantoliano in the opening scene and we spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out why. Pass the popcorn, baby, I'm hooked.

We spend a while explaining Guy Pearce's amnesia, which seems variously bullshit contrivance and kinda half-ass plausible, but a whole lot of time looking at his crazy tattoos, trying to figure out just who the hell Joe Pantoliano is, just who the hell Carrie-Ann Moss is, and seriously, trying to figure out who Guy Pearce is. The story unfolds at a nice, brisk clip, and all kinds of cool little touches are thrown in, like the classic:

Guy Pearce (voice-over): Okay, so I'm chasing this guy . . .
Other Guy fires gun at Guy Pearce.
Guy Pearce (voice-over): Scratch that, he's chasing me.

A lot of people don't buy the ending. Not me, I think it's terrific. But the reason I've always liked Memento is because—in spite of its low budget and bona fide independent status—I judge it by the same standards as a normal Hollywood thriller. Because, in spite of all the cute writing, Memento is shot and cut in a very dull, stiff, conventional fashion. It's not even in that unobtrusive Sidney Lumet style where he's pulling his Network false humility “I don't want to get in the way of the script” routine. Memento is actually really boringly shot. That doesn't get in the way of it being good, since the script is the thing here, but still. It's the one Achilles heel Memento has.


Insomnia (2002)


It's actually this movie that made me decide to do this post, because I've been up for about 36 hours for a variety of highly entertaining reasons. I'm not quite at the point Al Pacino is toward the end when he's supporting his entire body weight with his beer bottle while Nicky Katt tells the greatest joke ever: “What has two thumbs and loves blowjobs? [points thumbs toward self] Thissssss guyyyyyyyyyyyy . . .” But don't fuck with me. Because I'll explode.

Insomnia was first a Norwegian picture with Stellan “THESE ORDERS ARE SEVEN BLOODY HOURS OLD” Skarsgard, easily one of the coolest actors currently breathing. The original Insomnia was pretty good, it was a little stiffly paced and flat visually, but Stellan Skarsgard gets fuckin meshuggeneh (always fun to watch).

The remake is a borderline pile of horseshit involving Al Pacino's inability to sleep because it's sunny 24 hours a day in Alaska in the summer. Actually, the real reason Al Pacino can't sleep is because Robin Williams is running around overacting and for truly stupid reasons has decided that he's going to announce that he's the killer to the cops. And he lights up Al Pacino's partner—the guy from the Hal Hartley movies—right in front of Al Pacino, which leads to some gravelly-voiced angst. And a whole lotta not sleepin'.

Now, I'm not one to poke holes in verisimilitude unless you pull some Straw Dogs shit on me and I have no choice. But I have insomnia. Insomnia doesn't mean you're awake all the time. When it hits you bad, what happens is, you watch X-Files reruns until 5 in the morning and then putter around your apartment singing Bob Dylan songs to yourself until the 6am morning news starts, and about a half hour into the morning news you blink your eyes and it's 10-11 and time for coffee. Also, that rarely happens consecutive nights without a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine, and I've never had a couple hundred dollars worth of cocaine. Anyway. Al Pacino being awake for five, ten, however many bullshit amount of days in a row it's supposed to be is just fuckin dumb. I don't care if he is Al Pacino, he'd be dead, or permanently insane.

Oddly enough, even though it's fucking retarded and there are about ninety annoying flaws—many of them in the movie's central nervous system—Insomnia is not that bad a movie. Partly because Chris kind of learned how to shoot, or at least without that fucking arthritic shooting and cutting he had the last time out. Partly because, until pretty recently, sending in Al Pacino to save a shitty movie about MEN was so reliable you could set your watch by it. In any case, it's not worth rewatching, but it doesn't suck, and it served its purpose in proving that Chris could direct a studio picture.


Batman Begins (2005)

My first exposure to this movie was in the form of a phone call from my friend Steve in Chicago. I waded through a little screaming and hyperventilating, about thirty-five fucks, and various and sundry expressions of frustration and displeasure before I realized Steve was talking about how badly filmed the action scenes in Batman Begins were.

Me: “They're really that bad, that you notice they're that bad? They're not just undistinguished?”
Steve: “No, dude, they fucking suck. Motherfucking the whole thing is fucking shot in fucking closeups and shit is so blurry you can't even tell who's fucking doing what to fucking whom!”
Me: “Well, scratch going to see Batman.”

Because, really, life is too short. I did finally see Batman Begins but not until it was on HBO, and the action scenes sure did look like shit, but I wasn't sure whether it was just pan-and-scan mutilation or what, so I Netflixed it for the sole purpose of determining whether the action scenes actually did suck that much. Sadly, something was lost in translation seeing the whole-screen image: the action scenes still sucked, but they didn't suck balls. I had been kind of excited watching Christian Bale kick ninjas in the nuts while making that Welsh taking-a-dump sound on HBO, because the possibility existed that in viewing the totality of the image a level of ineptitude yet to be glimpsed in the history of mankind, let alone cinema, might present itself. But no.

The rest of the movie isn't that bad, although they take for-goddamn-ever with the origin story and the villains, aside from Cilian Murphy as the Scarecrow, are gay. Not good gay, not George Sanders saying “read my column, the minutes will fly by like hours.” Gay. 7th grade gay. First of all, Batman fighting the fucking Mafia? And Gerald from the fucking Full Monty is not only an American but Italian? Fuck outta here. Ra's Al Ghul. Feh.

But, like I was saying before I got sidetracked, the movie really isn't that bad. Christian Bale does a decent job, though I must have missed the part where he has his vocal cords removed every time he puts on the Batman outfit. However, when he gets done doing donuts in that military vehicle and says to Morgan Freeman, “Does it come in black?” Yeah, I surrender, that was good. And I don't care if I'm the one cranky old fart left who remembers that the pre-Scientology brainwash Katie Holmes was hot. She was. Sure she was in over her head in this movie. The fucking director was in over his head in this movie.

Again, that Insomnia caveat. In spite of all this, not that bad. And, unlike Insomnia, rewatchable. But make sure you have some friends and some beer so you can movieoke the action scenes Rocky Horror/The Room style.


The Prestige (2006)

Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale are rival magicians who get competitive at the expense of innocent people's lives and their own souls. Scarlett Johansson shows a lot of moxie trying an English accent. Michael Caine manages to stay awake long enough to act in a couple scenes. But—and note, the universe decided to put “Cat People” on my iTunes right when I started talking about this movie—David Bowie plays Nikola Tesla in this. Which means that The Prestige is awesome.

The movie looks great—Chris, a couple weird choices like having a couple exteriors in Victorian London be modern-day LA notwithinstanding, has been coming along nicely with the visuals—and the constant mindfucks that Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale lay on each other (and the audience) are entertaining up to a point, but the third act feels as long as the whole first two put together, just because there comes a point when shit just gets a little too “get the fuck out of here.” And so The Prestige is ultimately three-quarters of a pretty sweet movie, but that three-quarters is damn fine. (For comparison's sake, see also The Illusionist, which isn't as good but compensates by being a bit more laid-back and having a more satisfying ending).

Minor aside: DAVID BOWIE PLAYS NIKOLA TESLA. Note the following massive achievements in David Bowie's acting career:

---managed, in The Man Who Fell To Earth, to look more like an alien as basically The Thin White Duke than he did as Ziggy Stardust or Aladdin Sane.
---played the Elephant Man.
---those tight pants in Labyrinth.
---responsible for the single strangest sequence in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, for which he should receive an honorary Oscar, the Nobel Prize, and a brand new car.
---nailed Andy Warhol. As in, played the part of Andy Warhol well. I don't know if he ever nailed nailed Andy Warhol, I've only heard the same Mick Jagger rumors you have, though “Angie” was not about Angie Bowie, it was about Anita Pallenberg.
---turned in the single coolest cameo ever in Zoolander. Don't look at me like that, it was great.


The Dark Knight (2008)

Rectifies a huge problem with the first Batman by introducing a proper villain: The Joker. Heath Ledger was the truth, RIP. The whole cast is pretty great, too; Aaron Eckhart in particular is tremendous. Christian Bale, though, still has that weird removed-vocal-cords voice as Batman.

One really surprising thing here is that out of nowhere Chris jumped in his progression as a visual stylist from retard to functioning retard to average Joe to HOLY FUCKING SHIT. The Dark Knight is not only a gorgeous-looking movie, it's gorgeous with a swagger, like, yeah bitch, watch this crane shot, that'll show you motherfuckers raggin' on the crappy framing in Memento.

Although Chris always was a pretty good writer, his writing took a similar evolutionary leap as his camerawork. There are dozens of meticulously constructed subplots, little touches of brilliance, and the script provides Tiny Lister with the best part of his career since he played the president of the universe in The Fifth Element (the shame of being told “you got knocked the FUCK OUT” by Chris Tucker in Friday now a distant memory).

Alas, the one caveat with The Dark Knight: it's too fucking long. But you have to hand it to Chris, at this point in his career, that's less of a flaw than some of the millstones he was dragging around earlier. Movies that are too fucking long are in fashion. But this really is too fucking long. After the Joker blows up the hospital the pacing falls off the rails and the resolution—which is goddamn depressing, dude—takes forever to come together even though it's so obvious as to be foretold. But, again, like The Prestige, the first three-quarters makes up for the rest. And the first three-quarters of The Dark Knight can hold its own with anything in cinema. The only reason dickheads like me harp on it not being perfect is because it was so close to perfection.


Inception (2010)

This will serve as the conclusion, since Inception's not out yet. But I'll answer the long-ago posed question (“Can Christopher Nolan direct?”) by saying, I'm every bit as excited about Inception as all those fanboys I insult constantly. Yes, Christopher Nolan can direct. His pictures are flawed, but who among us is not? Even when his movies don't work, he still has a level of intelligence and balls uncommon among mainstream directors. And when his movies do work, they can even make someone like me become passionately invested in a comic book movie. That takes skill, boys and girls.

So, come join me over on imdb, where we can read about the rumors about Chris Nolan and David Fincher's heated competition to snag the Little Orphan Annie reboot! But proceed with caution, and think before you post.