The Batman

What can I say that hasn't already been said? If you've read more than one review for The Dark Knight, then you'll have heard that it's far and away the greatest Batman movie ever made. You'll also have heard that it's one of the best crime dramas ever filmed, and that it's probably going to be easily identified as the best blockbuster 2008 has to offer, which is quite a statement next to films like Iron Man and WALL-E.

All of those things are true. The Dark Knight was one of the most complex, moving, powerful films I've ever seen. It was difficult in a way that no other comic book movie and few movies of any other genre have ever been, and far more rewarding because of it. If I was a crier, I would have wept for the pain and beauty of it all.

The Joker. Again, what new thing can I say? Heath Ledger's death was universally tragic because he was probably the most gifted and dedicated actor of my generation. I'll just tell you that his Joker is not a character. He is an overwhelming and unstoppable force of evil and chaos. Heath Ledger virtually disappeared behind the hideous makeup and a performance that will without question go down as one of the most riveting and revolutionary ever meted out on film. My greatest personal compliment is that he succeeded in making me fearful of his appearances on screen. You don't like this villain. He's entertaining…sort of. More, he's horrifying. Every time he stumbled into view, I cringed at what he might do, which was always unpredictable, and always terrible.

And Batman was always, always several steps behind him. Iron Man satisfied the desire to see a superhero kick butt. The Dark Knight does not. I won't give anything away, but no one is safe. Batman won't die, this we can rely on. Beyond that…the stakes have never been higher. This film will surprise you over and over and over again. There is no great twist at the end because the entire movie is comprised of twists and surprises—some of them, mercifully, quite wonderful. And, of course, some of them not.

I loved this film. I knew I would, but I couldn't know how very MUCH I would. The hype and anticipation were as high as they could possibly be. If this film had been anything less than spectacular, I would have been furious. But it's not. It's more.

I saw it in IMAX—it was worth it. But I'm going to see it again this week. Probably on Thursday, when I don't have work. I need to see this film again. The first time through, it exhausted me. I had to hang on for life as the story progressed and, when it was over, I had probably comprehended barely over half of the film. Only after the second run will I be able to feel I've seen the whole thing.

In summary, hyperbole ceases to have a definition in the context of films like this. No praise is too high, and my praises are not high enough. Thus, I am, in the end, left without words to describe my love for The Dark Knight.

Rambow

Whenever I sit down to start spilling the contents of my mind onto paper or a computer monitor, I have to be careful. I'm a storyteller at heart. I love stories. I have within me a bottomless well of endless passion for them. But a lot of the stories I want to tell have already been told, and well. This is natural, because when I hear or see a wonderful story wonderfully told, it ignites my passion for storytelling, and long after, I find myself seized with a desire to tell that story myself, or something very like unto it.

So of course, as a child, movies made their mark on me. The stories they told embedded themselves deep into my heart and mind, and I will be influenced by the movies I saw when I was younger more than any I see as an adult. Somehow, and by the very same magic that the film itself represents, Son of Rambow captured that idea perfectly.

Will is a timid dreamer who meets Lee, a child-demon who wreaks havoc on all things "mature" around him. Lee has aspirations to be a filmmaker, and to accomplish his dreams, he has a VHS video-camera. Did I mention they're in the 80's? Well, now I did. When Will ends up at Lee's house, he chances to see First Blood, and he...um...you could say he just sort of explodes. When Lee returns, he finds Will gone. It turns out that Will's comprehensively capable imagination has fashioned him into the son of Rambo, who turns out to be seeking his father's freedom from a terrifying, vicious captor (who turns out to be a creepy looking scarecrow.)

Shortly thereafter, Lee and Will have teamed up to create their film: Son of Rambow. As time goes by, the project accretes additional actors and crew, and becomes a strain on what has become a very meaningful friendship between Lee and Will.

I don't want to say anything else. Every minute of this film is absolutely wonderful. I was so completely, so deeply invested in all of the characters that I couldn't stop my eyes from periodically widening in a futile attempt to take it all in more fully. It was funny (very very funny), gripping, and sentimental in the best possible ways.

Everything about this film was great. I was blown away by the acting of every character, but most of all by Will and Lee--I have never seen better child acting. I believed these kids were real all the way to the end. And I adored them. Seriously, who knew that this kind of performance was possible from that age group? It's a special tribute to the director, who himself must be very well in-touch with his own inner-child.

I was also continually surprised by this film. Within the first fifteen minutes (probably much sooner than that, actually) I had learned not to try and guess what would happen next. Rambow intuitively embodied the unpredictability of the most entertaining children you know. I fell in love with it much the same way I sometimes fall in love with children I meet. In all of its innocent recklessness and unbridled passion for living, Son of Rambow is ultimately a simple but moving story about two friends discovering and then youthfully wielding the magic of filmmaking. How could I not adore this movie?

Science and Religion

I just finished reading "The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke, the same man who brought us the literary incarnation of "2001: A Space Odyssey," which remains one of my favorite science fictions to date.

Here's the short synopsis (of "City" not "2001"): Humanity, several billion years in the future and after having taken part in a galactic empire, has ultimately confined itself to the only two remaining cities on Earth. Both of these cities are totally isolated from one another by the deserts that cover the rest of the world, and both of them have lasted, virtually unchanged, for a little over one billion years.

The story starts in the first city, Diaspar, where the inhabitants are essentially immortal. The protagonist is, more or less, the first person born in the city for millions of years, and the story follows his actions and how they affect the future fate of the human race.

Like all "hard" sci-fi epics, the less you know beforehand, the more entertaining the read, so I won't give anything else away. But Clarke is good. His worlds are vivid, believable, and endlessly fascinating. I would certainly recommend this novel to any hard sci-fi fan. Note, the distinction I'm making here is significant. "Hard" refers to fiction which is rooted in known reality and theoretical science. "Soft" science fiction, on the other hand, doesn't bother much at all with that sort of tedium and produces things like "Star Trek" and "Star Wars," both of which are more closely related to fantasy and westerns than they are to science fiction, but I digress.

As I've already made clear, I enjoyed the book. It didn't instill the same childlike awe in me that the more famous "2001" did, but it still fascinated and entertained me in ways only good sci-fi can. That said, it suffers from a lamentably typical anti-religious bias that plagues many of the smaller minds in science. I use the word suffer here to describe the very real way in which it diminishes the work. When an author treats science as the only rational faith to which human beings ought to ascribe, he needlessly alienates a significant percentage of his readership. His fiction is no longer honest at that point, it's preachy. No one likes getting preached at. I'm Mormon, and I typically never read Mormon fiction, because many Mormon authors have not learned how to tastefully incorporate their faith into good literature.

Science is not religion. When it is treated as such, both are cheapened and diminished. There's a great little commentary on this topic by Orson Scott Card in what is mostly a review on "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," so I won't go too far into it. What I will say is that believe what you will, it is wrong to openly attack others' systems of belief. Accepting that, one can understand the degree of thoughtlessness and arrogance Clarke displays when he uses, as a major theme and plot device in his story, the "inexplicable insanity" of humanity's obsession with religion. In his fascinating (but still, lest we or he forget, very fictional, and very logically flawed) billion-year distant civilization, mankind has evolved past the primitive compulsion toward religion, and instead has fully embraced the Truth that science so clearly and patiently offers.

This is all quite unfair of me, because Arthur C. Clarke passed away a matter of months ago. My grief over his loss is sincere. He was a great mind and a great author. Perhaps my time would be better spend in soliloquy, but my mind is more consumed with the tragedy of his scientific arrogance. This will ultimately prevent much of his work from reaching the enduring status of work by more sensitive, thoughtful authors. Thank goodness, I suppose, for "2001," and for Stanley Kubrick--without whom Clarke may very well have been forgotten entirely.

Walls and Es

Sometimes, you just have to go do things. Like, for instance, putting down a bunch of Dew and staying up till 2:30am to see Pixar's latest masterpiece, even though you still have to get up at 7am for work.

The last time I stayed up for a midnight showing, it was for 10,000 B.C., and it was only because I was bored. I wanted to get out and do something fun, and I decided that that film would only be entertaining if it was really late anyway. I was right.

My reasoning for catching WALL-E last night was quite different. I wanted to see it more than anything. I have, over the past few years, become a devoted disciple of all things Pixar. This company is making the best family films of our generation--also the best animations, and the best comedies. I say of our generation, but it's possible that I could replace those two words with one word: "ever."

WALL-E had to be good. It was from the same people whose worst film to date (Cars) was still heads and shoulders above every other animation that year without question. I only didn't like it because it wasn't PIXAR good. It was good, just not phenomenally, extravagantly, perfectly wonderful like pretty much everything else they've done. But then they shaped up and put out that Rat movie, and proved that they hadn't lost anything. They're still the best, and they'll continue to break their own records for greatness with each passing year.

This was the promise they made with Ratatoille, and it's the promise they kept with WALL-E.

I won't go over plot details because they're everywhere. The best I can give you is my personal response to this exquisitely touching film. And my response was exactly that: I was touched. I was touched by all of the things they tried and succeeded to do with 97 divine minutes of animation. It lacked nothing in comedy, but if even if it hadn't been funny, it would have been beautiful - the cinematography was stunning beyond words (yes, cinematography can be appropriately used in the context of animation.) And even if it had been neither funny nor beautiful, it would have been touching. When was the last time something "cute" brought tears to your eyes? I'm a hard sell for cute. Most of the time, when something goes for cute, I go for the mental ax, and then whatever it was that was supposed to be "cute" ends up mangled and covered in blood in my mind.

But WALL-E broke my heart. I've, seriously, never seen anything more adorable on screen.

Along the same lines, one of the best kept secrets of this film is what a spectacular character Eve turns out to be. You don't get that from the previews or any of the other promotional stuff. Other reviewers have mentioned it sparingly, but listen, there was no way I could be prepared for how wonderful "she" was. I had no concept of what kind of a character WALL-E's crush would be, so I was blown away by it.

The last surprise was the message. Make no mistake, this is a Green movie. But there is no possible way Pixar could have delivered this particular message with more power, and more taste, than they did. And it worked. Amazingly, it worked. My personal aversion to the latest fashion of environmentalism could have very easily ruined this film for me. But it didn't. Instead, I gave the whole package a nod and just went right on loving this movie with my whole heart.

WALL-E won't even have to blink to get the Oscar for best animated feature this year. But it is also unquestionably the best film to grace the cinema so far this year, and the only other movie that will challenge its position for the rest of the year will be The Dark Knight. That's saying a lot, considering the quality of this summer's blockbusters, and the fact that I'm already sort of planning on Knight becoming one of my top ten favorite films of all time as soon as I see it.

But for now, I'm with the robot. Thus the chorus of adoring praise for this film gains one more voice.

Furious, Horrified, and Saddened

In case you haven't heard, the Supreme Court ruled today that the death penalty is unconstitutional in cases of child rape.

I'm trying to picture a conversation between Thomas Jefferson and Justice Anthony Kennedy. Let's just assume that Mr. Kennedy holds fast to his views and says all the same things to Jefferson in such a meeting. I can't imagine that meeting ending without Anthony lying broken and bleeding on the ground.

Since when did the rape of a child under the age of 12 leave its position as one of the most despicable, unforgivable crimes in the minds of EVERY SINGLE RESPECTABLE PERSON in this country? Isn't this America? Don't we bloody our hands in the defense of the rights of those who are unable to defend themselves?

Maybe I'm being unreasonable. Eight-year-old kids ought to be able to stick up for themselves and say, "No!" when a full grown man decides to do the unthinkable.

Or maybe, if that fails for the child, we should have a vote. You see, I have this rock in my hand, and I, along with the vast, vast majority of my fellow Americans, am without this particular sin. Really, I don't mind if I don't get to be the first, just as long as a big, heavy stone does get thrown, and just as long as it hits its mark.

God save America? With legislation like this, the prospect is becoming far less likely.

Got Smart?

Despite what one of my friends claims as her only explicable reason for not loving Get Smart, Steve Carrell's latest foray into the comedy scene contained next to none of the despicably overused crotch humor all of decent civilization has finally come to despise.

If you haven't heard about this film...well, first of all, I'm surprised. It got plenty of ad-time, and Steve Carrell is currently a comedy darling. You really should have heard of this movie by now. BUT, if you haven't, here's a very brief description: This is a film adaptation of a popular TV comedy of the same name about a secret spy organization built to combat their evil Soviet counterparts. The movie ends up being your typical action comedy, of which there are simply too few.

Let me rephrase. There are far too few good action comedies. Shanghai NOON, Rush Hour (ONE), The Mummy, and, to some degree, the Indiana Jones movies are all great examples, but there really aren't a lot of them. And when they're done well, they're an absolute blast and a half. I think that no other genre (hybrid or no) can satisfy the need for fun quite like it.

And Get Smart was an awful, awful lot of fun. I haven't laughed that hard in a theater in...oh who knows. I laughed, out loud and often. And by the end of the movie, all I could do was smile. And decide to see it again in the near future.

First of all, this is Steve Carrell at his best. He was perfectly cast for this part, and he doesn't succumb to any predictability in filling the role. I was constantly impressed with the uniqueness of his quirky character.

Anne Hathaway was a much tougher sell because I haven't seen The Devil Wears Prada (I do plan on it, I promise), and so I can't claim to have ever enjoyed watching her on screen. Well, she did a fabulous job in this film. I adored her character. She was professional, capable, sexy, uptight and almost completely believable. Shoot, I even bought the chemistry between her and Steve. Awesome work, dudes (who made this movie.)

The rest of the cast worked great as well. There were no terribly weak spots, to speak of. Even the Rock managed to make me believe, for large segments of the film, that he was actually an actor. Good job, big guy. It was hard for him, but he pulled it off. (And he wasn't starring, which was...well, needless to say it was essential for the success of this movie.)

I could go on. I won't. See this movie. Take the kids, even. Sure, it's PG-13, but this is a family film, as far as I'm concerned. It's one which possesses that rare quality of being accessible and satisfying to almost every type of person. So go have a blast.

Classics

I made a discovery yesterday--or, I guess it would be more accurate to say that I came up with a theory.

It happened while I watched The Mighty Ducks for the first time in...oh...probably fifteen years. So I sat there, really enjoying the movie because, well, DUH it's the Mighty Friggin Ducks! But now I'm a film student.

So what did the film student in me say, you might wonder? (I wondered; you likely did not.) I thought, the cinematography in this movie ain't half bad. And, for an early 90's kids/family movie, the writing could be so MUCH worse than it is.

This is my theory: The movies that endure over the years probably owe a lot to their cinematographers. It's true that the general movie-going crowd probably aren't too focused on the details of composition, angle and focus, but they know when it's good. It just looks good. It feels right and meaningful. That's what good cinematography does--it validates the film.

Of course, it can't compensate for total failures in other areas (I'm thinking of the three recent Star Wars films right now.) But see if you can notice the superior work of an under-respected Director of Photography when you go back to watch some of your favorite classics. They may not be "arty" films, and they may not have been well-received by the critics of their time (or ours), but I'll bet the cinematography is good. Good enough that there are plenty of shots that send little shivers up your spine and make you think, "Man, I love this movie."