THE LOSER HAS TO FALL

Mamma Mia! is the movie version of Red Bull. It is absolutely guaranteed to raise your energy level, but it's practically guaranteed to give you the jitters, it's artificially sweet, and it leaves a foul chemical aftertaste.

Based on the ginormous Broadway hit, Mamma Mia! begins on a supremely photogenic Greek island with Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), shortly before her wedding to Sky (Dominic Cooper), sending out invitations to the three men who might be her biological father; the three men who had relations with her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) one marvelous summer 21 years ago. As Donna and her old friends Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski) reminisce about the good old days, Sophie has to deal with the unexpected development that all three men show up: architect Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), banker Harry Bright (Colin Firth), and travel writer Bill (Stellan Skarsgård). I can already see your brow furrowing: "Hey, isn't that pretty close to the story of the little-known 1968 sex farce Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell?" Yeah, maybe, but Buona Sera isn't chockablock full of songs from the Swedish disco superstars ABBA.

(In which case, perhaps it should have taken a cue from the band's music videos, and been a remake of a Bergman film...Summer with Monika, perhaps. Who sets an ABBA musical in Greece?)

The problem with the film is a simple one, and no, it's not that it's a jukebox musical, although Lord knows it's easy enough to fuck up that particular genre, which can be as good as Across the Universe or as bad as Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The problem is that everyone involved is extraordinarily desperate to make Mamma Mia! the most god-damnedest fun summer musical extravaganza that you ever did see, and they fall very far short of that goal, and it is a truth universally recognised that the more anxious you are to produce a super-duper fun movie, the more dire the results will be if you miss. To make my case, I shall turn to the most manic & therefore the saddest moment in the film: the production number set to ABBA's #1 super-smash "Dancing Queen". In the context of the story, this song is about Rosie and Tanya trying to remind Donna of the great old times when they were all young and lively, and to convince her that she's still got it going on. As they sing and dance from Donna's bedroom down the streets of their darling Greek town, all the local women stop whatever labor they're doing, and follow the three to the docks, where seemingly the entire female population of the island joins them in a chorus line. Setting aside the peculiar decision to make "Dancing Queen" into some sort of half-assed feminist statement, the number suffers greatly from being too big for its own good: why end with a giant mosh pit of dancing ladies when you could just as easily make it about three women having a good time in private? And then there's the matter of the number's pointless and irritating slow-motion shots, but those are entirely beside the point. The point is, first-time film director Phyllida Lloyd has decided that bigger is necessarily better and funner, and ain't nobody going to stop her from making everything as giant as she possibly can.

The results aren't fun, so much as they are sad. Yes, that is the word. Mamma Mia! is a sad movie, with the energy of a gang of depressed clowns hiding their depression in a haze of cocaine.

There might not be anything as utterly dispiriting as watching people pretending to have fun, and that is quite literally the only card the movie has to play. It tries so hard to be an uplifiting tale about women of a certain age grabbing life by the balls, of stuffy men letting go of their stuffiness, of young people drinking deeply of life, and it all comes across as maniacs faking jollity. Besides Lloyd's chaotic, ill-considered direction (I'm not sure if I'm meant to admire that this über-chick flick was directed by a woman, but bad directing is going to be bad directing, whether you have a penis or not), most of this can be blamed on the frantic performances given by Baranski, Walters, and - I'm heartbroken to say - Ms. Streep herself. I might go so far as to call it the worst performance of Streep's career, if only I'd seen more of her less-regarded pictures; at any rate, it comes across like her idea of "fun-loving middle-aged gal" is to play her role according to the mid-'90s Jim Carrey playbook, with just a bit less mugging and comic vocalisations, and no talking assholes whatever.

At least she sings well enough (as suggested by A Prairie Home Companion, two years ago), as indeed almost everyone sings well enough, given that nobody ever claimed that the ABBA songbook was full of particularly vicious melodies, and given that it's all little more than a movie star karaoke party. The only exception is Brosnan, who proves that it is indeed possible to screw up ABBA with a singing voice that sounds a bit like a dairy cow giving birth. So if the one and only reason you want to see the film is because you like ABBA and you like famous people and you want the two to be combined, sally forth! Although you might be better-served by just picking up the soundtrack CD. Seriously, though, lousy singing has recently been a bane of the musical genre (damn you, Mr. Tim Burton, damn you to Hell), so the fact that the singing is at least decent in this film counts as a triumph.

Really, the only particularly good, pleasing thing about this film which tries so unfortunately hard to please is that lovely and talented Amanda Seyfried comes across exactly the way her role needs, charming and good-natured, with a crisp, clear voice. In one number, she canoodles in the ocean with the almost as lovely Cooper, and the resultant explosion of youthful eye candy is probably the best moment in the whole film; assuming, that is, that you've written off the songs by this point (I had), and hot beach sex is the only thing left to keep your attention occupied (it was for me). No, despite all the good intentions in the world, Mamma Mia! is just too clumsy, spastic and broad to function in anything like the way it's supposed to. This is what the death rattle of the film musical sounds like, and as a particular lover of that genre, I couldn't be sadder. There's only emptiness, nothing to say.

4/10

TSPDT #341: LES VAMPIRES

In the misty depths of cinema history, when the very idea of a "multi-reel", "feature-length" movie was still in its infancy, we come across a bizarre chimera: neither fish nor fowl, neither feature nor short. I refer to the serial, a form born and popularised in the early 1910s, and still alive and kicking in America during World War II, though now lost and mostly forgotten in the English-language world. Such a queer beast is the serial, at least in its Hollywood guise: a predetermined number of episodes, each running a predetermined length, each ending with an easily-resolved cliffhanger, plopped in front of the main feature week after week, produced on the smallest of budgets. But let us not be too harsh on the serial; it survives into the modern age in the form of arc-based television series such as Lost and The Wire, reviving an aesthetically dead medium and featuring in some of the finest narrative art to be created in the new century.

Of course, we don't have to catapult to the present to find examples of the serial form being used to create great cinema. In the Teens, the French director Louis Feuillade was crafting serials that, since their rediscovery in the '40s by Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque, have come to be regarded as among the finest entertainments of the silent era: chief among them the five Fantômas films, and the ten-episode, almost seven-hour Les Vampires from 1915 and 1916, our current subject.

Nowadays, when we talk about an important films from the years 1900-1920, we tend to mean those that significantly revolutionised cinematic language, which was something you could do a whole lot of back in the first couple decades of the art form. But Les Vampires is hardly a revolutionary project: frankly, it's a bit hidebound and simple. Feuillade openly spoke against the "art film" impulse, which apparently referred to those movies like the contemporaneous The Birth of a Nation, which addressed serious themes in experimental ways. None of that fancy "cross-cutting" for Louis Feuillade, no sir! Les Vampires is a film of static shots, all the action happening from one perspective like a filmed stage play; sometimes he moves the camera, and it's pretty damn exciting, and sometimes (more often later on in the serial), he'll cut to close-up shots to make sure we notice an important detail. Twice, he actually uses that damned cross-cutting, moving between two scenes occurring at the same time. But in the main, this is exactly the kind of movie that impatient youngsters like to dismiss as boring or old-fashioned. Yet here we are, 93 years later, still talking about it - because even if it's not very adventurous formally, the one thing that Les Vampires has that so many movies lack, then and now, is a cracking good story.

The Vampires, you will perhaps be sad to learn, are not a group of the blood-drinking undead. They are a gang of supercriminals operating in Paris, their leadership hidden in shadow and their actions untraceable. Leading the fight against their reign of terror, we meet Philippe Guérande (Édouard Mathé), ace reporter for La Revue Mondiale, and his silly sidekick Oscar-Claude Mazamette (Marcel Lévesque), who bucks tradition by being one of the very few comic relief figures in the whole history of film to fail at being completely and hideously annoying. Whether he is genuinely comic, now that I cannot quite argue with a straight face. But he is appealing, and this is not something that most of his successors will be able to claim.

As fast-paced entertainments go, there's only one real problem with Les Vampires, and unfortunately it's a doozy: Philippe Guérande is a bit of a pill, through no fault of Mathé's. It's always a hazard with movies pitting a noble hero against a band of outré baddies, that the baddies are far more entertaining. Guérande is supremely competent, blandly moral, and no damn fun at all. Which seems like it's going to be a huge problem at the outside: Episode 1, "The Severed Head", spends most of its 30 minutes following the reporter as he looks for clues in the death of the chief inspector of the Vampire case, found in the country as a decapitated body. There's some gaudy melodrama to be savored as he stumbles across trap doors, hidden passages, and shifty locals, but for about the first 25 minutes, all I could keep thinking was how much I was not looking forward to spending seven hours with this dude. Then, the crazy shit starts to go down: a mysterious package for the reporter turns out to contain the inspector's head, the kindly Dr. Nox who was renting a room to Guérande turns out to be the villainous Grand Vampire (Jean Aymé) in disguise, and the last shot of the episode follows a black-clad figure creeping out of a window, sliding down a pipe and slinking off into the night. "Ah," I think to myself, "the movie just started."

And lo and behold, from that moment on Les Vampires will swing between two poles: either we're watching Guérande and Mazamette, and it's vaguely interesting and diverting, or we're watching the incredibly evil plotting of the Vampires, and it's amazingly super-awesome. And the super-awesomest part of all is just about to come onboard: after a second episode so brief as to barely deserve mention - having never seen a French serial, I'm not sure if it was characteristic of them to enjoy such variation in the running time of individual episodes (from 13 to 55 minutes), but all evidence I've found seems to indicate that it was a peculiarity of Feuillade's, and one that serves him well - we come to the third episode, "The Red Codebook", and barely has that episode begun than we meet the intoxicating supervillainess Irma Vep (Musidora, born Jeanne Roques).

Oh, Irma Vep! Perhaps the first iconic villain and fully-rendered independent woman in the cinema (and a shame it is that those two milestones should be the same figure), it's virtually impossible not to love her: whether she's vamping onstage, or creeping around the good guys' homes in a variety of disguises, she is always the center of attention, sexy and dangerous before it was common to see sexy and dangerous rolled up in one. Small wonder that 81 years after her debut, Olivier Assayas would title his metaphorical study of the history of French cinema Irma Vep, centering the plot of the film around the attempt of an aging director to turn Maggie Cheung into the most seductive faux-Musidora possible. Irma Vep - do note that her name is an anagram of "vampire", something the film makes clear in a nifty animated effect that is almost as iconic as the character herself - is the Platonic ideal of a femme fatale: though she will destroy any man who takes her, no man would dream of resisting her.

She's the most prominent Vampire, but that's not to say that there aren't plenty more to delight in watching: for example, the dread Grander Grand Vampire Satanas (Louis Leubas), who has a cannon that comes out of his study wall with the flip of a switch, that can blow up buildings and boats. Then there's the Vampires' arch-rival Juan José Moréno (Fernand Herrmann), a hypnotist of such craft and skill that even Irma Vep herself falls for his trickery. Like many a TV show to follow, Les Vampires peaks in the middle, from episodes 4-8 (and especially 5 and 6), which uncoincidentally happen to be the same episodes where Moréno appears. He's the proper antagonist for the marvelously baroque Vampires, not the wimpy Guérande, and in the final two episodes, where the Vampires are just trying to kill the reporter, all of their gigantic schemes to steal fortunes and kill innocents forgotten, the air begins sagging out of the series at an alarming rate.

Seven hours is, I suppose, a long time to support as slender an idea as "gang of awesome criminals fight a newspaperman", and even before the diminished ending, Les Vampires is clearly running low on invention: more than half of the episodes end because Mazamette just so happens to be in the exact right place to stop the crime and tell Guérande everything. But when it's clicking, and it clicks much more often than not, Les Vampires is a proper masterpiece, with plenty of giddy ideas and lovely compositions - hey, just because Feuillade didn't want to move the camera, doesn't mean he didn't think about how to put imagery together - and so what if it's not Terribly Important? It's Terribly Fun, which is all the director ever wanted, and in those wonderful moments where Musidora's kohl-marked face stares right out of the screen and into your soul, it's Terribly Perfect, too.

SUMMER OF BLOOD: IN WHICH JOHN HOWARD CARPENTER LOSES HIS FREAKING MIND

For this summer's slasher festivities, I selected the Halloween and Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchises for the most pragmatic of reasons: I'd already done Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, and I simply picked the next two biggest names in the subgenre. But as I reach Halloween II, I'm stunned by how many similarities can actually be drawn between this film and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2:

-Both follow seminal movies in the development of the slasher film that were released before the boom began in 1980; both were released after the boom. Yet in both cases, the first film is structured more like a slasher film.

-Both follow an ending that was left open, but clearly meant to stand without a continuation. Both were only released after the spring, 1981 debut of Friday the 13th, Part 2 ushered in the biggest wave of obligatory sequels known to cinema history.

-Both snagged the director of the first film in a major creative position.

-Despite this, both are pretty much useless.

Of course, by no means is Halloween II so very wretched as TCM 2 - it is not a "clever" attempt to muck about with the genre by adding "comedy" - but by the same token, Halloween wasn't such an anomaly in John Carpenter's career as the first TCM was in Tobe Hooper's. The one man also directed Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China and The Thing. The other directed The Funhouse and Lifeforce.

"Oh, but Tim," you might well say, "John Carpenter didn't direct Halloween II! That schmuck Rick Rosenthal did." And yes, that is true: the film was directed by a man whose later career consisted almost entirely of journeyman work on TV dramas. But honestly, Rosenthal's work isn't all that terrible - certainly not very good, and he can't think of an imaginative composition to save his life, but with Dean Cundey coming back as a DP, the two men at least put some effort into retaining visual continuity between the two films. No, the real reason that Halloween II sucks gnat scrotums with quite such effortless flair is the dire, dire screenplay, with its flat logic and non-existent momentum and deeply ill-considered retconning. And just look at the screenwriters - John Carpenter and Debra Hill! Hey, you know what other movie they co-wrote?

Besides, if we're to believe the half-heard rumors that creep around the project's history, then Carpenter stole the director's chair away from Rosenthal for some last-minute reshoots. But not just any reshoots - apparently, Carpenter thought that the first cut was entirely too bloodless, and he personally oversaw some new gore effects; an ironic thing, given that one of the most common complaints about Halloween II is how much bloodier it is than the first film, with all of the mythic scariness getting chucked for mercenary concerns. And then twenty years later, Ghosts of Mars was released.

I don't mean to get ahead of myself. Let's start at the start, and the single finest decision made in the scripting of Halloween II, given the fact that the film shouldn't have existed in the first place: it opens in the same instant that the first film ended. Most slasher sequels, we should note, subscribe to only the loosest notion of "continuity," but the second installment in the Adventures of Michael Myers stands out, with much of the same cast and most of the same conflicts. And given that Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence are part of that returning cast, the film at least had a fighting chance, more than the endless Friday the 13ths with their brand-new slate of Meat could ever hope for.

Indeed, the new film starts a bit before the last one ended: Laurie Strode (Curtis) sends her babysittees off to the neighbors, while Michael lies dead on the floor. She stands whimpering, he slowly rises, chase is given, Dr. Loomis (Pleasence) bursts in and fires seven shots from his six-round revolver (a lovely continuity gaffe to open a film with, and dialogue later refers to him shooting six bullets), Michael falls, "It was the boogeyman", "As a matter of fact...", the body is missing. Then the new stuff begins, as Loomis bursts out of the front door to look at the spot where the killer should be (it was the backyard in the first movie), and runs next door to beg the neighbors to call the police. The neighbor fella is dubious, asking if this is a Halloween prank, claiming that he has been "trick-or-treated to death". Loomis's response is awesome - as he will have much cause to do over the next 90 minutes, Pleasence takes one look at his character's overwrought dialogue, and chews the shit out of it: "You don't know what death IS!"

Notwithstanding what I said about Rosenthal not being all that poor a director, the opening few shots give us an excellent chance to see otherwise: with compositions that are mostly identical to the ones Carpenter already executed, three years earlier (and with one of those being among the first film's most iconic shots), Rosenthal can't quite manage the same level of Baroque uncanniness. I'm not certain that I could explain why, exactly. It's much akin to the feeling you get when you're listening to a cover of a song that's being played the same way that it was originally, but there's just something really, really wrong about it.

Speaking of which, this is right when the credits begin, and we get to hear a piece of music being played the same way it was originally, but really wrong. Yes, Carpeneter's marvelous score is back, and it got fucked with. Since it was already performed on synthesizers, I can't claim that the problem is how electronic it sounds. I'm not certain what the difference is, honestly, though I think it might be that the new version has a more prominent bassline, and the effect is kind of discoey. A common ailment of the early '80s slasher. The credits themselves are also nearly identical: a jack o'lantern on the left, the titles on the right, the camera slowly moves in on the pumpkin. Which, this time around, splits open to reveal a human skull. Everything we've seen and heard so far contributes to the overwhelming sense that what we're about to watch is so very close to the last film, except that it's lousier.

So, out of the credits, and into a POV shot that is sort of like the one that opened Halloween, except clumsy, and just not as good- okay, you know what? Typing "like the first time, but shittier" is going to get very tough on my fingers, so just assume that it happens over and over again throughout the movie. So POV-Michael stalks his way into the poor part of town, where he sneaks into a house where two unpleasant old people are watching Night of the Living Dead - not content to resemble its much superior predecessor, Halloween II is now actively trying to piss me off by bringing up as many better movies as it can think of - to steal a kitchen knife. He then walks across the yard to a house where a young woman named Alice (Anne Bruner) is talking on the phone and learning of the slaughter of three teens just a few blocks over. She turns on the radio, which helpfully recaps the last film - apparently, three teens have just been slaughtered - and Michael kills her, in a tremendously bad gore effect highlighted by an obvious cut to a fake head a fraction of a second before he drives the knife into her jaw.

Back at the scene, Laurie is loaded into an ambulance, and driven to a building that is always referred to in dialogue as "the clinic," but says on its side, Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, and is a giant structure that looks to be the main medical center for the whole county. Thereon hangs a tale.

It is a fact undeniable even to the film's staunchest defenders that the depiction of Haddonfield Memorial is tremendously botched: in this whole big building, there seem to be five employees, one patient (Laurie), and a nurseryful of newborns. To say that this is unconvincing is underselling it something fierce. But suppose, for a moment, that this wasn't supposed to be a hospital; that it was meant to just be an emergency clinic like you could actually find in a drowsy Illinois town like Haddonfield is meant to be (I say "meant to" for the same reason it was "meant to be" Illinois before; ignore those green trees and short-sleeved teens in the Midwest on October 31, please). That tiny staff and that utter lack of patients makes a touch more sense, maybe? And it just happened that they found an abandoned hospital, soon to be torn down, and it was easier to shoot there than to rig up a clinic set, maybe? Or maybe not, given the large number of facilities the "clinic" is seen to have, including a classic thriller-style hot tub that can be turned up to fatal temperatures. That is to say, 125º Fahrenheit, somewhere between "a hot shower" and "a hotter shower," but maybe the girl who gets scalded to death just has sensitive skin.

Before Laurie can be admitted to the emergency room, Carpenter, Hill and Rosenthal treat us to one of the sweetest images ever: a little boy (Ty Mitchell) with a giant razor blade stuck in his mouth, blood gushing from the wound. This little boy appears in three shots: once when he gets introduced, once when his mother (Leigh French) is arguing with the admitting nurse about finding a doctor, and once when he leaves, all healed up. He serves exactly no plot purpose whatsoever. Whatsoever.

It seems like an annual thing for me to defend whatever outrageously gory horror flick just opened from the legions of moralistic critics who think that showing people dying in pain is the sure sign of a depraved sociopath behind the camera and/or in the audience (meanwhile, Wanted currently enjoys 73% on Rotten Tomatoes). But there's moral indignation and there's moral indignation, and there is simply no excuse on Earth for putting that little bit of nastiness in the movie. It smacks of the screenwriters' distaste for their project - though I should hasten to mention, I have no outside reason to believe that either Carpenter or Hill had any such distaste. It's a sour moment, one in which all the fun of the first movie (assuming that it can be called "fun") and even the fun of the more giddily stupid slashers (ditto) is sucked out in a mean-spirited gag.

So let's see...Laurie ends up in the hospital, as EMT Jimmy (Lance Guest) flirts with her a little bit before she gets drugged. That takes care of her for a while. Meanwhile, we revolve back to Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers, another actor returning from the original), driving around in the sheriff's incredibly green car - all of the police cars in Halloween II have shockingly green dashboard lights - and we're treated to the one completely human moment in the film, as Brackett learns that his daughter was one of the victims in the massacre (a callback to an ironic scene the original, when he frets over her safety shortly after her death), rebuking Loomis with the words "Damn you", delivered with all the rage and pain in the world. That kind of emotion has no place in a tawdry slasher, and we're well on our way to Tawdry Slasherland, so Brackett is whisked from the film, and Loomis is set free to wander around Haddonfield alternately screaming that Michael is an animal! and that we must stop Michael!

When we're not chasing Loomis, we're wandering through the ludicrously empty halls of the hospital, and Halloween II stops being anything other than a cheap slasher film, though at least one with decent actors and great cinematography. Michael knows that Laurie is in the hospital, and he jets right off to find her, but before he can go there he has to sneak around the perimeter, slaying guards and nurses in inventive ways, including the dumbfounding scene where he siphons all the blood out of Mrs. Alves (Gloria Gifford), whose role in the hospital is a bit hard to identify, but she is extraordinarily competent at it. So I imagine that it's a sign of respect, or something, that she is given such a European death, but it's staged like somebody who knew only that "a puddle of blood siphoned out of a body" sounds European, but never actually saw a giallo. And the moment is ruined anyway when Jimmy comes in and slips on the blood, sort of Keystone Kops-like.

There are so many differences between a pre-1980 slasher film and a post-1980 slasher film, but I think the one that might be the most remarkable is that, après Pamela Voorhees, it was no longer enough for a psycho killer to kill teens. He had to kill them in the most Rube Goldbergian way possible. Think: in the first Halloween, Michael had his kitchen knife. Leatherface had his chainsaw and hammer. They killed. But Mrs. Voorhees, she garroted kids, she stabbed them, she slit their throats, and her son!...It would take more than I have in me to list the ways that Jason thought up to butcher people. At any rate, Michael learned something from them in the brief span between movies, because other than the siphoning, we get to see stabbings, slittings, drownings, chokings, burnings, and poor Ben Tramer, Laurie's crush in the first movie, gets smashed by a truck, but not by Michael. The reason for all this is simply that it was How Slashers Were Done in 1981, and the reason for that, I think, is that audiences were much more interested in gore voyeurism than being scared. We'll be here all day if I try to make good/bad arguments about that development, but let me be content with saying that Carpenter and Hill didn't seem to like it, because in trying to make Halloween II a new-phase slasher movie, they destroyed everything about the property that was worthwhile in the first place. Along the way, Rosenthal manages to steal that classic "Michael just sort of appears from a dark space" trick, in a scene where he jabs a syringe into a woman's forehead.

So, okay, it's about 70 minutes in, and almost everybody is dead, and Laurie is creeping around the place. She didn't do much in the first film, mind you, but it's quite infuriating how much of Curtis's performance in this film is lying in a bed or looking very tired. She's managed to hide in a car, biding her time, and there we may safely leave her for Dr. Loomis, who is being escorted out of Haddonfield in a state marshal's car on the governor's orders, and in short order the writers play the dirtiest pair of cards they had, and start outright pissing on our memories of the original. Now, about twenty minutes earlier, Loomis had found the word "Samhain" written in blood at the local elementary school (I forget why it makes sense that Michael would have gone there, so he probably didn't). Loomis absently mentioned that Samhain would be Catholicised into All Hallow's Even, or as we like to call it, Hallowe'en. Now, he launches into the full-on crazy version of the same: in a monstrously purple speech, delivered by the delightful Pleasence like he was playing Richard III's drunk brother, Loomis more or less says that Michael kills on Halloween because of the druidic traditions of sacrifice on Samhain. Which he keeps pronouncing "Sam-hain" and now "Sa-win," like it's supposed to be. Also, there's no reason to believe the druids did that. But let's not quibble! The first seeds of Michael Myers's transition from Absolute Evil to Druidic Antichrist have just been planted! I hope I didn't just ruin the rest of the series for you. Ah, fuck it, the series was ruined ages ago.

Seconds later, in the very same scene as this bombshell, Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), the nurse who rode with Loomis to the asylum in the opening of Halloween and came along to escort him back to Smith's Grove, drops a bomb of her own: according to the Supa-Secret Myers File, he had a little sister, two-years-old when he was commited...who was adopted by a Haddonfield family when the Myers died in an accident when she was four...and now goes by the name "Laurie Strode," not aware of her adopted origins.

I must pause for a moment to collect my breath.


GODDAMMIT.


In the whole history of sequeldom, has any choice so entirely, self-evidently wrong ever been perpetrated on an unsuspecting masterpiece? I can't even imagine something that terrible - Michael Corleone was Vito's clone, Han Solo was Luke's father, Superman is actually from a race of space cannibals, Darth Vader built C-3PO when he was a little boy, I can't even make something up as terrible as: "Laurie Strode is Michael's sister". I knew it going in - I knew it before I ever saw Halloween - but that doesn't stop it from fucking with everything that made the original so utterly successful: Michael stalks Laurie for no reason. Now it's because he was out to finish the job he started 15 years ago, to become a druid fortune teller or some FUCKING THING, OH MY GOD, FUCK YOU JOHN CARPENTER AND FUCK YOU DEBRA HILL.

There's still a healthy chunk of movie to go, during which Laurie never finds out, and during which there are a few false scares, gory deaths and one tremendously satisfying shot of Michael appearing in a pool of red light. Then Loomis blows up the hospital with himself and Michael inside, and Laurie escapes just as Michael storms out of the flames to fall down "dead". And I don't care about any of it. Halloween II commits a single narrative sin that does the worst thing any sequel can ever do: it retroactively taints the original and makes it less interesting. We hates it, we hates it forever.

Body Count: Well...Dr. Loomis and Michael both sure seem to die, but we know better. Given that, the number usually put forward is 11, but it's not remotely clear what happens to Jimmy, so I'm going to run with more conservative 10.

Which number, by the way, is more than any of the Nightmare on Elm Street films, or any of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre films other than the most recent.

It ties the lowest-end of the Friday the 13th series.

HEART OF ICE

There are many types of people in the world, but the two I'm concerned about right now are these: those who hear about a new Werner Herzog film and immediately clear space at the top of the year-end Best Of lists, and those who, unaccountably, do not. I'm shamelessly one of the former; yet even I think that after the proficiently pedestrian Rescue Dawn, the mad German needs to do something to prove himself.

And he very nearly does just that with Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about the scientists living and working in Antarctica produced for Discovery Channel Films (I am undecided which is more shocking: that after he freaked them out with his final cut of Grizzly Man, Discovery would be willing to work with him a second time; or that he would be willing to work with Discovery a second time). Right at the start, the director/narrator basically admits that this is going to be a less-crazy version of The Wild Blue Yonder (not, of course, in as may words), and "less-crazy" is pretty much the best way to describe the film; less crazy than most of the filmmaker's notorious attempts to capture the limits of human endurance on celluloid.

One of the best-known of the director's many quotes about his art, and perhaps the most important thing he has ever said, goes like this:

"We comprehend that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs."

The creation of new images is at the center of most of Herzog's best work in the last 25 years or so, and in Encounters we find him not trying merely to create new "adequate" images, but in fact to replace popular, "inadequate" ones: the film is absolutely a self-conscious attempt to counteract the penguinification of Antarctica in films like March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. Oh, Encounters surely does feature a penguin; an obstinate fellow who marches off to his solitary doom, frozen and alone in the wastes. Put that in you pipe and smoke it, George Miller.

Herzog's focus is instead, characteristically, on the kinds of people who would willingly throw themselves into the most unforgiving environment on the surface of the Earth, and what effect they have on their environment. The encounters of the title are his brief visits with these individuals; the rest of the title cuts two ways. First, that Antarctica is the last place that human beings reached and settled, hence "the end of the world"; second, that as a result of the things he finds in Antarctica and the things people tell him there, Herzog grows convinced that we as a species have nearly run our course, and that we are at the beginning of "the end of the world" even now. In favor of this argument, he points out that even at the farthest corner of the world from the "natural" range of human expansion, our species has created a more-or-less suburban habitat in McMurdo Station, which the director compares to a mining camp, full of "abominations" like yoga classes and a soft-serve ice cream machine (and the longer you think about how the social center of an Antarctic research station is the soft-serve ice cream parlor, the stranger it becomes). It's a bit grim, is the film.

But also a bit funny: Herzog has been reading destruction and depravity into everything for so long that even (especially) he seems to have a good sense of humor about it, leading to such moments as his inquiry of a socially-awkward penguin scholar, "Can penguins go insane?" That's a quintessentially Herzog question, and he knows it, and it's one of many moments in the film where his essential liveliness breaks the wall of fatalism that he seems obliged to construct. Too, the film is a bit inspiring: perhaps because the film was co-financed by the National Science Foundation and the director was obligated to include something about science in it, and perhaps because he honestly felt moved by the search for knowledge that motivates every person he found in Antarctica, but there's only rarely been a film that captures the sense of wonder that scientific discovery can and ought to inspire in all of us.

But most of all, Herzog being Herzog, it is a visually marvelous film, moving from divers under the permanent shelf of ice - shades of the director's The Wild Blue Yonder, with less craziness and it must be admitted, less inspiration - to one of the world's three volcanoes where magma is exposed to the open air, to the contents of a time capsule located directly under the geographic South Pole. And more besides; though I expect the director views his efforts as failure, for my reckoning he's done just what he set out to do: he has found new images of Antarctica. On the Discovery Channel's dime, he's fashioned a film in two parts, both a visual tone poem and a paean to human eccentricity, and if it's not to the level of his best films, at least it's a strong return to form for one of our most vital filmmakers.

9/10

APOCALYPSE NOW

Let us begin by shooting the giant elephant in the room: yes, Heath Ledger is actually that good, and people would still be saying he was that good even if he were alive. His work as the Joker is just about the finest imaginable, and one of the most intense, most dangerous performances of a psychopath ever captured on film (And I don't just mean dangerous for the actor - though obviously, it was that. This is the kind of intensity that is at least a little bit damaging even to the viewer). There are levels upon levels to his creation of the funniest & scariest villain in superhero movie history; he does not merely play the Joker, he transforms physically into the Joker. So many individual elements of the performance demand your attention that the eye and ear and brain can hardly keep track of them all: his lilting, nasal voice, based on tapes of ventriloquists; his walk, with his head slumped into his shoulders as far as it will go, while he plods heavily rather than striding; the outsized, fluid gestures he makes with his arms; his spot-on comedic timing (his character is a clown, after all); the inexplicable and terrifying thing he keeps doing with his tongue, darting out like a lizard's or a pedophile's; and his positively bloodcurdling laugh. If you, like me, thought that Mark Hamill in the animated series had the final word on the Joker's laugh, then you, like me, are going to be delighted to be proven completely wrong.

Is it the case that Ledger's performance is the very best thing about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the feel-shitty action movie of the summer? Hard to say. Like all great films - and The Dark Knight is a great film, all right, so obviously the best superhero movie ever that it seems silly to mention - it's hard to pull out one element and say that it's "the best" or "better" than some other part of the movie. What we can say is that Ledger's Joker, less a character and more an avatar of chaos, is at the center of what makes the movie so damn good, and it's hard to imagine the film having a fraction of the same impact without such an anchor.

Anyway, before I get into that, I'd like to at least pretend that I am capable of this thing called "critical objectivity," and go through the things that the movie doesn't do well, or at least doesn't do as well as Batman Begins. The chief of these, tragically, is that Wally Pfister's cinematography isn't nearly as brilliant as it was in the first film, or in The Prestige. I say this without having seen the film in IMAX, mind you, and I'm very much looking forward to doing so. But even a giant movie screen isn't going to change the fact that the photography isn't as coherent with the total film as it was in the last Batman picture, where it was one of the chief vehicles used to express the film's mood and theme. By all means, Pfister's work in The Dark Knight is the work of a great craftsman with finely-honed skills. Shocking how that could be a step down from his last two collaborations with Nolan.

Related, undoubtedly, to the less-commanding cinematography, the overall look of the film - its design, that is - doesn't fit very well with Begins, and in a way that generally tends to favor the first movie. Compared to the Burton and Schumacher films, Nolan's first take on Gotham was a very model of gritty realism, as shot and staged, there was still something vaguely otherworldly about it, like maybe it was a little too gritty - it was a nightmare that a city had about itself, maybe. The version of Gotham we see in The Dark Knight is a quite a bit cleaner, for reasons expressed in the script, and a whole lot earthier: it looks quite a lot like any city in the world. Particularly, it looks quite a lot like Chicago, where it was shot, and in a few scenes the attempt made to hide the fact was so sloppy that I'm compelled to assume that Nolan and returning production designer Nathan Crowley were paying some kind of tribute to their host city when they left so many signs with the word "Chicago" on them - to say nothing of the flags advertising the Lyric Opera - so prominently in view. But I don't mean to get all sidetracked: my complaint is that the magical realism in Begins is gone now. Where the first film took place in a mash-up of the '40s, '70s and '00s, the new one is set firmly in an urban center of 2008. Lastly, a nitpick: there is no reason I can imagine that the Wayne Building, with its lovely art deco El trains, should be replaced in this film, and it doesn't help that in the first film, the Wayne Building was played by 1 N LaSalle, one of the most iconic skyscrapers in Chicago.

A final point of comparison where The Dark Knight falls behind Begins is the least clear-cut, and probably more a matter of personal taste. The story in the first movie is a timeless, mythic fable about how Bruce Wayne, the tormented prince of Gotham, turned himself into the Batman, and in the process destroyed himself. As presented in the film, that arc takes on the air of a Greek tragedy. The newer film lacks such an obvious narrative spine to hang everything else upon, though I'm pretty sure it thinks it has one in the fall of Gotham's White Knight, Harvey Dent, and the painful decisions that fall forces Batman to make, to save his city.

Which is not to say that The Dark Knight doesn't have an effective narrative scope, just that it isn't so elemental as Begins. Instead of being an heroic epic, the sequel is something like an apocalypse myth. I'm not going to recount the plot, because I'm not even certain that I could; instead of a clear structure, The Dark Knight feels more like a jumble of things happening, and as time moves forward those things become increasingly nihilistic. It's all centered upon the Joker, who is here presented not as a criminal quipster (as he usually is), but as a force of pure, destructive insanity (as he is in the very best Joker stories). Inasmuch as there is an arc, it is something like this: a sequence in which Batman fights mundane evil, the Gotham mob; followed by a sequence of general mayhem; followed by a sequence of very personalised chaos. Without seemingly trying to, the Joker's madness narrows in on what, specifically, will most torment Batman.

It's easy and probably accurate to read the story here as a typical crime drama (Nolan has claimed Heat as an influence), though one where the hero wears a superhero costume, which is suddenly halted and redirected into a semi-plotless pageant of agony by a force that can't stand to see anything "typical" permitted to live. As the Joker directs what happens in The Dark Knight, so in a way does he direct the structure of the film; this, along with Ledger's incredible presence, is why he dominates the film despite appearing in, at most, thirty minute of the the two-and-a-half-hour running time.

I can't imagine that having to play the human element in this madness was terribly easy, but the non-Ledger actors in the film all acquit themselves finely. Christian Bale, given a significantly less-demanding arc to play than before, still proves himself to be the most inspired actor ever to don the cowl. Taking a hoary old device like the love triangle, Bale is good enough, and wounded enough, that the subplot actually works, and actually stings. The implication at the end of the first film, that Batman, having first destroyed Bruce Wayne, would discover that he would like to bring Wayne back to life, is given a hefty workout throughout The Dark Knight, and the actor thrives on it.

The supporting cast is as good or better than they were in Begins: Morgan Freeman is given less to do, but he has one of the best lines in the film and he delivers it well; Michael Caine's role and performance have not changed in the slightest; Gary Oldman's Lt. Jim Gordon gets his own hint of a tragic arc in this go-round, and whereas he was merely pleasing before, now I found his performance to be genuinely moving. Of the newcomers, Aaron Eckhart's idealistic Harvey Dent is played without flaw - indeed, for the first 100 minutes of the film, I'd say that Eckhart gives the finest performance of his career. When the totally unsurprising surprise comes, that Dent is disfigured and driven mad and becomes Two-Face, we're treated to some horrifyingly effective make-up, and a somewhat disappointing downshift; though he's incomparably better than Tommy Lee Jones was in the same role in Batman Forever, Eckhart is also nearly invisible next to Ledger, and though he plays every one of his Two-Face scenes exceedingly well - the character's coin-flipping gimmick has never seemed so fucking scary before - he doesn't blow the doors off the film, and so he's somewhat easy to forget. Lastly, the celebrated arrival of Maggie Gyllenhaal to a role originated by Katie Holmes; to be completely honest, I never disliked Holmes in the first film (she did fine with an underwritten part), and I am resolutely unconvinced that Gyllenhaal improves the character of Rachel Dawes in the slightest. Oh, she's fine in what continues to be an underwritten part, but she's still the weak link on the A-team.

But back to that apocalypse: if I made it sound like the film is not at all fun, I'm not sure that I treated it fairly - it's not completely un-fun. There are some funny lines and rousing set-pieces, though fewer than in Begins, not a film noted for its good cheer. Frankly, The Dark Knight is a very exhausting film, the very opposite of escapism. Not because it is so long - for indeed, it feels hardly long enough, and though you feel every minute of the running-time (unlike e.g. the fleet Begins), this is because every minute counts, and when it's all over, you're kind of sad, like when Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is over. Of course, I forget that not everyone cares for Wagner, so you can feel free to substitute your own favorite 4+ hour opera into that simile.

Nolan has made a bit of a career for himself in making superhero movies - those can't-miss popcorn hits - into dour explorations of humanity's dark places, and to this I say: thank God and all the angels for Chris Nolan. Superheroes are, say it with me, Our Modern Mythology, but we maybe tend to forget that myths and epics are very bleak places to find yourself. Every myth foreshadows destruction, for the purpose of myth is not to give us a rollicking entertainment but to hold up a funhouse mirror to who we are as a people and where we are going because of it. Batman is the superhero Id, and it's not for nothing that he is called the Dark Knight, and not for nothing that Nolan chanced upon that title. Entertainment is entertaining and is a valuable thing, but The Dark Knight is something far more than just an entertainment; it is the most unsettling corners of the human psyche laid raw on a slab.

10/10

YES, FATHER. I WILL BECOME A BAT.

I started blogging in August, 2005, less than two months after the release of Batman Begins, and it's always been a regret of mine that I wasn't able to review what I still think to be the finest comic-derived film ever made. No time like the present to rectify that situation.

In the current comic-book movie flood that began in 2000, it's always seemed to me that 2005 ought to be regarded as the highest water-mark, producing three of the smartest, most stylistically compelling and absolutely the darkest films of the genre: in April of that year, we were treated to Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's noir nightmare Sin City, September had David Cronenberg's brutal meditation on American thuggery in A History of Violence, and right in between the two, Christopher Nolan sprang on an unsuspecting world a nihilist's fantasy dressed up in superhero clothes, Batman Begins.

Taking the contemporary vogue for "grittifying" genre entertainment to an extreme, Begins strikes a terrifically delicate balance: on the one hand, it is the most stripped-down of all the modern superhero movies, visually and narratively, even unto realism; yet at the same time, it does more than any other superhero film save perhaps Richard Donner's Superman to explore the idea that its protagonist is a mythological figure. It's the combination of realism and mythology that makes Begins such a nervy piece of summertime filmmaking. You can't have one without the other. Or rather, you could, but then it would be a superhero movie comme un autre, which it most decidedly is not in its current guise.

Broadly speaking, the film's story is divided into four movements, most easily identified by which villain is involved: in the first, billionaire orphan Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) travels to the mountains of Tibet to confront the ghosts of his past and learn to be a shadow warrior; in the second, he returns to his home, Gotham City, and sets about remaking himself as a symbol in the city's war on organised crime; in the third, Wayne, now Batman, discovers and takes down a massive plot to destroy the city; in the fourth, the most purely action-oriented, he finally gives himself over to the identity he has created and defeats his enemies.

What's not clear from that swell little précis is that the process by which Wayne invents and then becomes Batman is essentially tragic. To remove it from the comic book trappings, this is a story about a man who wants to become something else and then does so, and then learns to his shock that the person he used to be no longer exists. This has long been the unexpressed core of the Batman character, never expressed so explicitly as it is here, and thus there has never yet been a Batman story, on page or on-screen, with quite this kind of psychological trauma. If Ingmar Bergman had ever directed a superhero movie, I expect that it would have looked quite a bit like this.

Having that sad, terrible arc for Wayne/Batman to suffer through requires a remarkably strong actor in the central dyadic role, else the whole project would tumble down, and Nolan was blessed to find Bale, an infamously intense young actor whose remarkable performance simply must rank as among the best in superhero cinema, if not in popcorn movies as a whole. After the first phase of Batman features, marred as they were by scripts and actors that were never terribly interested by the relationship between Wayne and Batman, Bale's characterisation in Begins is a miraculous revelation - yes, this is what a Batman movie is supposed to feel like. He doesn't bring the character into the human realm; he brings the character someplace akin to Greek drama, a prince tormented by his demons until he destroys himself to destroy them.

If the story and the central character - writerly and actorly considerations - are what give the film its sense of heroic-tragic myth, it is the visuals that make it a work of grim urban realism, though it's easy to be so impressed by the film's final 90 minutes that one can lose sight of the opening scenes in Tibet, which have a touch of the misty and fantastic about them. As he has in every film save his first, Nolan worked with cinematographer Wally Pfister on Begins, and the result was so flat-out brilliant that even the genre-film ignorant Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences couldn't ignore it. Batman Begins comes in two basic colors: blue and yellow. The blue is all used up in the Tibet sequences, shot to look otherworldly and cold, adding much to the feeling that this is a fable more than a film. But when the film comes back to Gotham, Pfister's camera leaps into full-on Realist action, bathing nearly every moment for the rest of the film - day or night, inside or outside - in a particular shade that replicates the hideous golden glow of sodium vapor lighting. The color of the urban night, in other words, and in Batman Begins we find a perfect example of a very important distinction, between cinematography that is beautiful and cinematography that is effective. Only an absolute film techie geek could possibly think of Begins as "pretty" - indeed, other than Pfister's wonderful use of shadows in the night scenes, it's easy and accurate to claim that the film is just plain ugly. But it is a film about ugly things and ugly places, and for us to be seriously involved in Bruce Wayne's quest to clean up his city, we have to be first impressed with its filthiness.

Pfister's cinematography does that, to a certainty, as does Nathan Crowley's production design. This ain't no Burton Batman, hideous even as it's imaginative. This film's Gotham is a decayed urban hellhole, not nightmarish since it's so entirely real. With city exteriors shot mostly on the streets of Chicago, only marginally re-dressed, there is nothing interesting to distract from this Gotham's lived-in qualities. It doesn't feel like a movie set because it isn't a movie set; true, some graffiti and trash was added to make the city seem a bit dirtier and more dangerous, but these are real sidewalks and alleys, not a Gothic fantasy version of the same.

The realism of the setting and the heightened, Campbell-esque quality of the narrative oughtn't, maybe, work as well together as they do; but Batman Begins is a tremendously effective and moving work of pop art because of this collision. Oddly enough, the only thing that's left high and dry by the film's unique vision is the very thing that we expect to be delighted by when we go to a superhero movie in the first place: the film's action sequences just aren't that good. Is it Nolan's fault for skipping out on a second unit, directing every action sequence himself? I hope not, for I find his audacity in that choice to be altogether charming. But something about the fighting scenes, especially - the de rigueur car chase is done fairly well, actually - falls a bit flat; they've been edited so that it's hard to follow what happens, exactly, and they're awfully short. Nolan and Bale's Batman is apparently a brooder, not a fighter, and that's perfectly fair, but it means that the film is even less of an escapist summer entertainment than it might have been.

Then again, we get escapist summer entertainment ever weekend for four months of every year. Christopher Nolan had the temerity to give us a nihilistic summer tragedy, and a precious rare thing it is for a populist film to be so emotionally wrenching.

9/10

THE INDIE CORNER, VOL. 8

Watch enough of any kind of movie, and you're going to start seeing a lot of flaws crop up over and over again, and within the American indie cinema, the biggest problems are mostly related to the tininess of the productions: when too few people are divided between jobs that they're no good at, when ambition runs hard up against budget. Basically, I'm trying to say that I was at a very good point to enjoy T. Arthur Cottam's Carbuncle, which comes up with just about the cleverest solution I can imagine to those towering problems with the microbudget scene. Rather than ignore those problems (as so many do) or bend his production to his abilities (something rarely done, and it usually ends up making for really damn dull movies), Cottam indulges in all of the horribleness you can imagine in a clichéd low-budget drama, and then boxes it up inside a framework that sets it apart from the audience, all 8½-style. It is, frankly, one of the smartest films about filmmaking I have seen in many, many days.

Like Fellini's meta-masterpiece, Carbuncle is a work of gnarled layers that get more confusing the more you dig into them, but basically, the film is presented as the video documentary produced during the making of a film called "Carbuncle", written and directed by the egomaniacal eccentric T. Arthur Cottam, played by Carbuncle's writer-director, T. Arthur Cottam. About half of the film - our film, not the film-within-the-film - is made up of full-frame taped interviews with the cast and crewheads, and half is widescreen footage (still tape, I think, but filtered to look film-like) of "Carbuncle", which in the grand tradition of overreaching small-time art, has at least two apparently disconnected plotlines, involving a drunk social worker who falls in love with his developmentally disabled client in a trailer park, while a divorced father tries to hide his son from his ex.

It's hard to describe the film without giving away some late reveals, but it's safe to say that its best moments revolve around the arrogant, obsessed visionary who wants to make a film without seeming to know what that film is about, and the creative team that gamely follows him into the mouth of madness, assuming that since he's so unpleasant, he must be a genius. This despite his overwhelming lack of social skills, made manifest in his repeated attempts to find out what retarded people (his words, not mine) think of sex. It doesn't take us very long to note that his behavior is very characteristic of Asperger's syndrome, and that he either has that disease himself, or like so many irritating hipsters, wants to have the disease, to explain away his personal failings.

I have no idea whether Cottam-in-reality is at all like Cottam-in-the-movie, but either way I salute with some awe his willingness to pitch headfirst into a role that makes him seem like such a colossal dick. In which he is not alone: as much as it's a fairly clear-eyed study of the frustrations of mental impairment, Carbuncle is also a bloody-minded satire of the vacuousness of Film People. An actress proclaims, late in the film, that she thinks "Carbuncle" is going to be pretty great, despite all the evidence we've seen and her own testimony about how awkward the shoot was; that's just the most straightforward expression of a theme running through the movie, that nobody on a film set wants to admit that they'd be better off elsewhere, no matter how painful things get. The whole thing is ultimately a commentary on self-unawareness, both the kind that your brain forces on you and the kind that you adopt as a defensive mechanism, and a very honest (sometimes unto meanness) picture it paints.

CRIMINALS, A COWARDLY AND SUPERSTITIOUS LOT, CALL HIM...

What with Christopher Nolan's sure-to-be-a-masterpiece The Dark Knight mere days away, it seemed like as good a time as any to reflect on the storied cinematic history of Batman, remembering those good old days when comic book movies were a rarity and the good ones were treasured like solid gold.

Batman (Tim Burton, 1989)

The Man in the Cowl: Michael Keaton, fresh from collaborating with Burton in Beetlejuice, in the middle of his brief fling with stardom.

The Villain: The Joker, AKA Jack Napier (Jack Nicholson).

The Plot: While trying to prove that he isn't a threat to what little decency is left in the depraved Gotham City, Batman must fight the mob-hitman-turned-psychotic-deformed-clown who wishes to spread disorder for its own sake.

What Went Right: Oh, Jack. Sure, you've had a rough go of it these last 15 years - your typical hamminess single-handedly ruined The Departed for me - but when you're on fire, you're on fire. And there haven't been many places in the man's career where "doing a Jack" fit the role better than his demented take on the most notorious of all Batman's foes. It's easy to forget that the Joker is supposed to be a surpassingly frightening madman, and to be sure, a lot of Nicholson's $60 million performance is a bit sillier than insane, but the insanity is there, and it's delicious.

Also worth mentioning is Anton Furst's much-lauded design, rendering Gotham neither as a real city nor a comic book variation thereon, but a frightening industrial nightmare of girders and Expressionist angles, blacks and greys every which way you look. Not only does the film like dynamite on its own terms, but it served a role in the development of the summer mega-blockbuster that I think is typically ignored: unmistakably a Burton film, it was as far as I can tell the first giant smash hit outside of Spielberg where you could tell that the director was pumping a great deal of his own personality into the proceedings. And that has borne fruit in the amazing run of modern-day blockbusters, where even the bad ones tend to feel like the work of an auteur. Good directors don't just make good tentpole movies, they make characteristically good tentpole movies, and I do think we have Burton's success and Warner's gamble to thank for that trend.

Danny Elfman's score, meanwhile, is a treat, especially his main theme, which remains one of the great motifs for any movie hero.

What Went Wrong: Mostly, scenarist and co-screenwriter Sam Hamm, who clearly doesn't get - or doesn't give a damn about - what makes Batman Batman. It's easy to focus on the unfortunate choice to give the Joker a distinctly non-canonical origin story, but at least we can forgive that on the grounds that the resultant Joker/Batman parallels make for a fine movie qua movies.

No, where he and Warren Skaaren (and the notoriously comic-indifferent Burton) really drop the ball is showing who Batman is. Especially, who he is relative to Bruce Wayne; not only does the film stumble in demonstrating the simple fact that they are the same man, assuming perhaps that the audience isn't that stupid (in which the film is at least a step up from the expostiontastic Superman), it never really draws any picture of what drives a multi-millionaire to don a fetish suit and fight crime. Keaton's performance doesn't help matters, as he establishes the tradition that an actor will be a good Bruce Wayne or a good Batman, but not both - he is a good Batman, while his Wayne is just an addled but decent fella with no real personality - and in the end we have simply no sense of who this man is, and why he's so terrifically unconcerned when his butler brings a lady into the Batcave just to be peevish.

Speaking of which: Kim Basinger is a disaster as photojournalist Vicki Vale. She's just not that good of an actress, and her role is terribly underwritten with little or no motivation (how much better that she had a moment at the end like Rachel's in Batman Begins!), and Vicki is nothing more than a cipher who exists just to be kidnapped and set up the climax. But at least she serves a purpose, unlike Robert Wuhl as her reporter buddy Alexander Knox; a perfunctory character played with Wuhl's customary asshatishness.

Since I ended with Elfman in the "good" column, let me end the "bad" column with the out-of-place Prince songs, wedged into the film to give it some absolutely needless music video clips.


Batman Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

The Man in the Cowl: Still Keaton.

The Villains: Remember that lovely, lilting tagline, "The Bat. The Cat. The Penguin"? They're played by Danny DeVito (Penguin) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Catwoman).

The Plot: During the Christmas season, villainous department store owner Max Schreck (Christopher Walken) convinces sewer-dwelling outcast Oswald "The Penguin" Cobblepot to run for Mayor and authorize a shady power plant deal. Meanwhile, Schreck tosses his meek secretary Selina Kyle out of a tall window, but she's brought back from death by the something something of cats, and turns herself into a kitten with a whip and the world's tightest leather suit to avenge her gender and her new species. The Dark Knight stops all this as Bruce and Selina unknowingly fall in love.

What Went Right: Jack may have given one of his greatest performances as one of the greatest screen supervillains ever, but he's outdone on both counts by the majestic, mesmerising Michelle Pfeiffer, at her career peak in what remains the single finest performance of a baddie in any comic book movie (look for that to change on Friday). Besides the great shift she makes from mousy Kyle to the inordinately sexy Catwoman, she delivers the innuendo-laden dialogue Daniel Waters wrote for her with some of the most orgasmic line-readings in all of the cinema: a personal favorite is "I don't know about you, Miss Kitty, but I feel so much yummier." Not to mention that she looks amazing in a catsuit. She's absolutely purrfect.

Yeah, I just went there, and you can't make me take it back.

Moving right along: Bo Welch, in his third and final collaboration with Burton, replaces Furst as designer, and perhaps emboldened by the positive response to the Gothic excess of the original, he goes completely nuts in turning Gotham into a demented land of set design gone amok. The difference, to my mind, is simple: Batman was a giant studio film that Tim Burton directed, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton film with a giant studio budget. That distinction makes a world of difference in bumping the second film's look all the way toward the director's famously idiosyncratic vision, right at the time that he was making his most distinctive films.

And that spreads to everything else: the character design (most obviously the Penguin, though what other filmmaker could have produced that Max Schreck?), and subtler things like the camerawork and even Elfman's score (including a quote from the not-yet-released Nightmare Before Christmas) have a much stronger Burtonian tang than they did in the first movie.

What Went Wrong: A lot of tiny things, but the one that bothers me most: Batman takes his sweet time Returning. In the first 30 minutes of the film, Batman/Bruce Wayne is on screen for less than three. Burton's sympathies as a storyteller clearly lie with the Penguin (here and in the first film, I've always thought that this was strange: Batman seems like a natural Burton-esque outsider), and having to give both villains their own origin story eats up a lot of time here, in a film that already seems to be much more about the individual beats of the narrative than its overall arc.

Splitting its focus between three figures means that Returns is an embryonic example of a sin that would not only torpedo the franchise, but still occasionally plagues the modern comic book movie: Too Many Villains Syndrome. When a film picks up too many bad guys, something has to give somewhere, and it's rare for the film not to suffer as a result. Remember how wandering and flabby Spider-Man 3 was compared to the first two? There's also X-Men: The Last Stand, which has the reverse problem: Too Many Heroes, or at least a strong focus on the wrong heroes. Admittedly, Returns handles its dual villains better than either of its successors would, but the plot takes a looong time to come together. And even when it does, the treatment of the Penguin is often scattershot.

Keaton, in the meantime, has not noticeably improved his Bruce Wayne, though his Batman remains brooding and intense.


Batman Forever (Joel Schumacher, 1995)

The Man in the Cowl: Noted crazyperson Val Kilmer, on the backside of his era of stardom.

The Villains: Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones), formerly Gotham DA Harvey Dent, scarred and gone crazy with a split personality; bitter Wayne Industries researcher Edward Nygma, out for revenge and calling himself the Riddler (Jim Carrey).

The Plot: As Two-Face plots his revenge against Batman, who he blames for his accident, the Riddler plots to destroy Bruce Wayne with the help of his brainwave-sucking helmet. Meanwhile, the amorous psychologist Chase Meridian falls in love with both Batman and Wayne, while the Dark Knight trains a new sidekick in the form of orphaned circus acrobat Dick "Robin" Grayson (Chris O'Donnell).

What Went Right: Though Schumacher is often given a lot of shit for the neon excesses of his Gotham, after Burton's crazy German nightmare, it's hard to say that it doesn't look like a comic book; it just doesn't look like the same comic book. Sort of a Blade Runner feel by way of anime and the then-unpublished Transmetropolitan comic series.

Kilmer's Batman, meanwhile, though not as strong as Keaton's (and suffering, like Keaton, from a boring milquetoast Bruce Wayne) is not nearly as bad as history remembers it. He also manages to play the love story with a great deal more credibility than Keaton did in the first Batman.

Also, the film plays Robin's origin story as well as it possibly could, given that Robin isn't really a very good character.

What Went Wrong: Nipples. On the Bat suit.

Plus, a really dire case, not only of Too Many Villains, but of Extremely Crappy Villains. It's not just bad that Two-Face, one of the greatest Batman antagonists, is given a tossed-off origin flashback while the Riddler - a lousy villain who was only ever remotely good in the Batman TV show, where his lameness fit the campy tone - is origined in loving detail, and that when the two team up, mostly because the film requires that they do so, the Riddler is made very much the focus. No, it's that the screenwriters, including the vile Akiva Goldsman, have crafted the characters to be lazy retreads of the Joker: give his propensity for laughing and being maniacal to Two-Face, give his warped sense of humor to the Riddler, call it a day. And that gives Jones and Carrey absolutely nothing to work with, leading to the worst performance of Jones's career, and for Carrey... remember how completely terrible he was back in the early and mid-'90s? I hadn't, until I rewatched this film.

Casting Carrey and introducing Robin tips the film's hand, really: it's taking its cues from the Adam West show, and not the infinitely darker Burton films/post-Frank Miller comics. But the show needed the enforced cheapness of 1960s television to make its camp work, whereas Forever is a summer tentpole. The goofy tone and big budget clash badly, though not half as badly as they would in just two years...

Chase Meridian is a completely wasted character (thank God for Kidman that she had To Die For around the same time, else I really do think that this film would have set her career back years), trapped in a terribly unsuccessful attempt at digging into the Batman/Bruce duality that the Burton films ignored. I appreciate that the attempt was made, sure, but it's cringingly bad.

Lastly, do you know what, besides Jim Carrey, really sucked in 1995? CGI effects. I mean, really sucked bad. I forgot about that.


Batman & Robin (Joel Schumacher, 1997)

The Man in the Cowl: George Clooney, striving to make the jump from TV to movies.

The Villains: Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), the one-time medical scientist Victor Fries, whose body and emotions turned to ice in a cryo-freezing accident; Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), who was Pamela Isley before a psychotic colleague killed her after exposing her to a super-serum that turned her into a half-plant; Ivy's giant supersoldier henchman Bane (Jeep Swenson).

The Plot: Mr. Freeze wants to turn Gotham - nay, the world! - into an ice cube, unless he can get the money he needs to save his cryogenically-suspended wife, on the brink of death; Poison Ivy wants to destroy all animals and turn the world into a haven for plant life. The plant lady and the man who turns everything into sub-zero ice join up in a very well-thought-out plan. Meanwhile, Batman and Robin (O'Donnell) get to feuding, while the dying Alfred's (Michael Gough, in his fourth turn as the character) niece Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) shows up for no goddamn reason except to arbitrarily become Batgirl.

What Went Right: Its failure at the box office ensured that Joel Schumacher would never be given another Batman film to fuck-up; indeed, that Batman would be shelved until someone with a clear vision came along to save him.

What Went Wrong: My lord, it's like asking what makes the ocean wet. How about the profound fakeness of all the sets, full of ice that looks just like plastic? Clooney's terrible inability to find his role? I'd hoped that knowing as I now do that he was deliberately playing a "gay Batman" might have made it a touch more interesting, but it doesn't. His Wayne is better than his Batman, which is a switch, but both are pretty terrible.

Here we've got the two worst villains in the series: Freeze makes "cold" puns in something like 85% of his dialogue, while the crazy and sexy Poison Ivy is marred by having chaotic motivations that lead to the single worst performance of Thurman's career. "Single worst performance of the career" can apply to a couple other people here, too, including Silverstone, whose career isn't exactly bursting with brilliant performances. The fact that I had to use IMDb to recap the plot is a sign that something went wrong; all I could remember - and I just rewatched the fucking thing last weekend - was "a whole lotta fight scenes, including that awful bit where Batman and Robin survive a free-fall from the upper atmosphere."

Mostly, that's the problem in a nutshell: endless unmotivated fight scenes and a TV-show-inspired goofy tone that always errs on the side of shrill. God, I hate Joel Schumacher.


HOLY BAT-BONUS!

Batman (Leslie H. Martinson, 1966)

The Man in the Cowl: The notorious, beloved Adam West.

The Villains: The pompous, waddling master of fowl play, the Penguin (Burgess Meredith); the devilish clown prince of crime, the Joker (Cesar Romero); the creator of criminal conundrums, the Riddler (Frank Gorshin). Gosh, and the Catwoman (Lee Meriwether)!

The Plot: The four trickiest super-criminals in Gotham kidnap a scientist and his dehydration ray, for unknown ends, but as Batman and Robin (Burt Ward) know too well, their minimum objective must be...the entire world.

What Happened: Words like "good" and "bad" are tricky things to use in regard to this movie, which was based on the campiest television program then known to American broadcast history (and which once featured Liberace in a story, thus creating the campiest thing ever produced in the history of the world). It's not really possible to judge it on the same terms we can judge the Warner series of films. It's not even very easy to judge it in comparison to its origins; it's basically twice as long as the normal two-part serials on a TV show not noted for its wild fluctuations in quality.

That said, there are some things that can be said both for and against it. Its sense of humor is well in place, including what has long been my favorite single West-era gag in "shark repellent Bat-spray." The Riddler's riddles aren't as warped as they were in the best of times, but it's still very agreeable to watch such silliness as:

GORDON: "What weighs six ounces, sits in a tree and is very dangerous?"

ROBIN: "A sparrow with a machine gun!"

GORDON: "Yes, of course."

Odd as it is to say about a film where the villains' plot is so completely irrelevant, the film suffers a bit from Too Many Villains: Romero's Joker is given virtually nothing to do (they make up for it by giving Meredith some of the best lines he ever delivered as the Penguin). Then, there's the tricky matter of Meriwether's Catwoman: fine on her own right, but even 42 years later, it's hard not to compare her to Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt and find her lacking. Gorshin's Riddler is, as usual, Gorshin's Riddler; the only place in the character's 60-year history where he was worth a damn.

At 105 minutes, is the film a bit long? Yes. If you think of it as four episodes (and its conveniently structured almost to the minute for you to think of it that way), the fourth is pretty much disposable next to the first three. But for what it is - namely, the only convenient way to see any of West's Batman while the series sits around in Rights Hell - it's pretty hard to say anything against it.

Besides, out of the five films we've just looked at, it has by far the strongest emphasis on Batman rather than the villains. Is it just me, or does that seem a bit weird?

THE PERFECT MOVIE FOR THOSE WHO'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE BRENDAN FRASER SPIT ON THEIR FACE

So, the big techies in the film world would have it that the super-realistic "Real D" 3-D technology is a paradigmatic leap in the art of cinema like sound, color and widescreen were. Okay, let's stick with that. If the coming of great 3-D is as big a deal as the coming of sound was, then we're in the "gimmick phase" still, and Journey to the Center of the Earth is our very own The Broadway Melody: a crappy exercise in mediocrity that comes up with nary a single interesting idea to show off the new toy, but just tries to dazzle the audience, with a lifetime of hearing people talk seeing things in 3-D, by showing nothing but scene after scene of people talking things being in front of other things, because while that might be about as boring as anything could conceivably be, well goddammit, it's not the kind of boring that you were able to see in regular old flat movies!

Since Journey is a watershed film (the first live-action narrative film originated in the new 3-D, after the concert docs U2 3D and Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus - the latter, God save us all, will be the first Hi-Def home video released in 3-D), it seems only right to use it as a stick to bludgeon the shortcomings of the technology it pimps out. No, wait, I meant "to use it as a case study in the abilities of the new tech", that's it. Oh, why bother? I've made no effort to hide the fact that I simply don't like the idea of 3-D movies.* And it just so happens that Journey showcases just about every reason why I don't.

Have you ever been to Walt Disney World? Did you see MuppetVision 3-D? Do you remember the bit where Kermit says "We promise not to stoop to any cheap 3-D tricks", and Fozzie comes out and asks, "Did you say, 'cheap 3-D tricks'?" and then blows one of those paper party noisemakers at the audience? 17 years ago, Jim Henson and company were already smarter than the blokes who made Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is nothing but a string of cheap 3-D tricks, though calling them "cheap" isn't really fair. Most of them are in fact very splashy 3-D CGI effects, albeit rather shaky CGI that looks all the worse because of its tendency to jump out at the audience. The practical effects aren't really a whole lot better; the film actually manages to incorporate two "spit at the camera" gags, when just one was already more bodily fluid zooming towards me than I particularly wanted when I bought my ticket.

The big set-piece that doesn't involve such gimcrackery is a mine-cart ride early on, that can't hold a candle to its grandpa in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; it suggests all of the dimensionality of riding on a roller coaster with none of the speed and wind and nausea and adrenaline. Making Journey the first summer movie that is both: a) truly comparable to a roller coaster ride; and b) significantly worse than a roller coaster ride. It's telling that the one moment that works perfectly is a sequence in which the 3-D effects are completely sidelined; the film's teenage hero jumps across floating magnetic rocks that slide around as he lands on them. Nothing about the sequence benefits even in the slightest from dimensionality (even the abyss he's floating above looks more like a matte painting than a real abyss), and it's absolutely the most thrilling moment in the film.

I freely admit, that in the right hands, 3-D cinematography might yet make for something brilliant and significant (arguably, it has: Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon, made in 1954 during the first 3-D fad, has at least two shots where the extra dimension is used in a significant way that deepens the story). It wouldn't surprise me if such a thing happens sometime in 2009; if not at the hands of John Lasseter's Pixar wizards, than certainly with James Cameron's Avatar in December (though I really do hate to admit that latter part). Meanwhile, we have first-time director, long-time visual effects artist Eric Brevig to shepherd Journey, and damned if that isn't painfully obvious in the way the film privileges effects over story, character, and composition.

Before I completely abandon this rant, one last point, a very important one I believe: being the first feature narrative made with the new tech, Journey gets to demonstrate one of its insurmountable limitations. The way that 3-D works is through parallax; there are two different but nearly-identical images on screen, overlapping each other so that once you put on the filtering glasses, each eye only sees one image, and sends that image to your brain. Which is what your eyes do all the time, anyway; stereoscopic vision is the result of each eye seeing a marginally different perspective, and your brain averaging the difference, so to speak, to indicate dimensionality.

In a 3-D movie, which is dimensionality being simulated on a flat surface, there is a trap that has already been fixed with the dome-shaped OMNIMAX system, but surely can't be helped on a multiplex screen: at the very far right and left sides of the screen, one of the images by default must extend a little bit further than the other (you can sort of see this if you open your eyes alternately, though the edges of your field of vision aren't in focus, so it's not something you'd ever notice) . If you travel close enough to the edge of the frame, it is necessary that one of the cameras will record a specific point that the other camera will not. And that point is not in 3-D. Meaning that for every single frame of the movie, the far edges abruptly flatten out; it's much worse on close objects. The edge of the frame does terrifying things to your perception, I learned. A man could go mad, he spent too much time at the edge.

Worse by far is what happens when somebody stands up in front of the screen, and walks to the bathroom. That tears some kind of dimensional hole in the fabric of the film itself, not unlike the effect, described by H.P. Lovecraft, that the city R'lyeh has on minds evolved in a normal four-dimensional universe. I would fain talk no more of what happens when somebody walks in front of the screen.

Oh, yeah, so Journey to the Center of the Earth is a film where Brendan Fraser plays a crackpot vulcanologist whose brother went missing because he was chasing the world described in Jules Verne's novel. That man's son, played by Josh Hutcherson, is along for the ride, because Fraser is a jaw-droppingly terrible guardian, and a sexy Icelandic mountain guide (Anita Briem) is there to be sexy and Icelandic. The film tells unspeakable lies about geology (in ways both large and very small), because of the long-standing tradition that in a kids' movie, you don't have to give a damn about treating the audience with even a scrap of respect. None of this matters; the only possible reason to see the film is because you are one of the three huge Brendan Fraser fans on the planet, or because you want to see things jumping at you in 3-D. I have nothing but sympathy for those people who saw this in regular theatres, where it must have had absolutely no reason for being whatsoever.

5/10 (Yes, 5/10. Harsh though I was, the film's chief sin is being godawful dull)

*Other ideas for which I've made no effort to hide the fact that I don't like them: sound, widescreen.†

†Apparently, I am 90 years old.