Man on Film: Inception

So you may have surmised I was not head-over-heels in love with Christopher Nolan's latest film, Inception. Really, the stars should have aligned in such a fashion that the end result was a pleasing one to me. Aside from the perceived misstep that was the Insomnia remake*, Nolan has done little wrong in my book. Memento was a total mindfuck, and Batman Begins and The Dark Knight were head and shoulders above your standard superhero fare. Sure, The Prestige was a little cold, but it was certainly better than its Dante's Peak counterpart, The Illusionist, and Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play pretty well off each other. Even Following was pretty damn good as I remember it.

*While I rather liked the original Swedish film, the resounding critical backlash surrounding the Nolan version combined with the choice of casting the two loudest over-actors in the past, well, ever was more than enough to scare me off.

With Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Michael Caine, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, and Tom Berenger on board, I think there is justification for being pretty damn excited. DiCaprio has been pretty solid for the past five years or so, especially in the work he has done with Martin Scorcese. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has quietly become one of the most promising young actors in the business. The foreigners brought in were great, and it was pretty sweet seeing Berenger in a major motion picture again. While I am not insanely into Marion Cotillard, she was solid in the film, and the glaring potential problem was Ellen Page going in. She may not have ruined the movie, but she surely didn't help it either.

Now, gauging my feelings by the series of little "Inception is totally the best movie since..." posts, you can certainly tell that my reaction to the film is not the most favorable.

For the most part, I think Inception is a pretty good movie. It has a complex narrative structure that makes you think about the movie after you leave the theater. While you rack your brain trying to piece together the action, working out the layered plot, it would be easy to convince yourself that the movie you saw was mind-blowing.

But what did it really do?

Aside from the superficial complexity of the narrative itself, there isn't a lot of depth to the film. With the arguable exception of DiCaprio's Cobb (and if you are really reaching, Cotillard's Mal), there is not a single person in the film whose is even remotely developed. Even Cobb, the protagonist doesn't really have anything profoundly change him. How is Cobb discernibly different from the beginning to the end of the film?

Additionally, there really isn't much of a deeper philosophical meaning to the film. There is the "what this reality?" dilemma and the open ending, but I would hardly say that either element is anything more than a sly little trick and the existential conundrum is relatively insubstantial.

It may seem like I'm nitpicking, and perhaps I am, but I think the main issue I take with the film is the rave reaction that the film has gotten. It currently sits at #4 on the IMDB top 250. That's of all-time. Granted, as more of the populace sees the film, it will slip down the rankings, but I really don't see how this film even remotely compares to, say, Rear Window or Casablanca.

I will even allow for the fact that the movie is pretty "cool," but I would have to say most of the arresting visuals are in the first 45 minutes, and then we are treated to the actual mission. Within the mission, I would argue that the only sublime scene is the hotel scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt in zero-gravity. The car chase and the alpine hospital sequence are both surprisingly pedestrian, and a lot rides on those being more than ordinary.

Clearly this review makes it seem like I didn't like the movie. I definitely wouldn't go that far. I liked it for the most part. In what had been a relatively shitty summer for movies up until its release, Inception was a breath of fresh air, but let's be realistic about the film. It has plenty of flaws, and some are fairly significant.

Find me a flaw in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Casablanca. North by Northwest. Hell, The Sting is starting from a better foundation, and that's essentially within the same genre.

I just want the world to have a little perspective about this film. That's all.

Man on Film: Worst Films of the Aughts - The Top Five

So here we find ourselves, staring down at an abysmal five films. The honorable mentions and the bottom half of the top ten have been covered. It's time to put the waders on because we've got a veritable stream of shit to make our way through.

5. The Master of Disguise - 2002

Every person I have ever met with Down Syndrome has been absolutely delightful to be around. Their disposition generally makes me feel bad for being such an awful person, and the thought has certainly crossed my mind that I'd be a lot happier if I had Down Syndrome. As much as I might like people with Down Syndrome, I don't really want to see a movie conceived by them, and that's the only explanation I can think of for the existence of The Master of Disguise.

There was a time when Dana Carvey, much like Billy Crystal (who we spoke about in the first installment), was considered funny. In retrospect, was the Church Lady that funny? Was Opportunity Knocks the high point of the 1990 comedic film docket?

Hindsight is 20/20. Seeing him go on the late night talk show circuit in the past ten years has just been sad, with each host tossing up incredibly lame softballs to let Carvey bust out his 20-year-old impressions.

This movie is a Dana Carvey star-vehicle at least eight years later than such a thing ever should have happened. If the picture above doesn't drive my point home, then here is the trailer:

I assure you, this movie is as dumb as it looks. I had to watch it at work once with some kids. I couldn't leave the TV room.

I should have quit that job when faced with the likeliness that I was going to have to watch it...

4. X-Men: The Last Stand - 2006

Now unlike many who took great offense to this film, I didn't actually care for the first of the three X-Men movies. It seemed like Singer & Co. tried to fit way too much into the film, the film lacked a narrative focus and direction, and the selection of X-Men for inclusion in the first film seemed a bit off to me. Add some questionable casting decisions (read: Anna Paquin as Rogue and James Marsden as Scott Summers) into the mix, and I came out of the theater very underwhelmed (definitely less than whelmed).

The second film in the series, however, was outstanding. Were I to make a list of the best superhero flicks ever, it would be in the top five* with ease. So when Brett Ratner's name was attached to direct, it became clear the film-going public would be the ones to pay.

*I think Spider-Man 2 was better and would probably place Batman Begins and The Dark Knight ahead of X2, but that's it.

Just how much they were going to have to pay would be impossible to imagine without actually seeing the film. To sum it up succinctly, Bryan Singer is having to be brought back on board after essentially being run off when he agreed to do Superman Returns and they are having to do an origins flick with Charles Xavier in his 20s.


Yes, X-Men: The Last Stand is that awful. The plot is paper thin. There is no set-up for anything that happens. It meanders from scene to scene with little regard for keeping the audience involved. Largely it is a film with set pieces around which a story is loosely tacked on. If it were a stand-alone movie it would be awful on its own merits. Given that it follows such a great film and essentially shits all over the goodwill that was built up in the second film makes its release a travesty.

Adding insult to injury, Ratner sees fit to anticlimacticly kill off characters that the majority of the audience has at least a decade of involvement with going back to the comic books and multiple cartoon randomly throughout the film, thus fucking the franchise going forward. The performances of all but Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, and Ellen Page (shockingly, but more on that later) range from mailed in to abysmal.

*Can someone please tell me how Shawn Ashmore continues to get work?

It was obvious when Brett Ratner, the 'brains' behind the Rush Hour franchise was signed to direct the third installment that it was going to be awful, but no amount of reshooting was going to save this film, Marvel Entertainment. You should have given this film the third-term, partial-birth abortion it warranted and just gone back to the drawing board with a competent director at the helm. Instead, we all get this, and you will find yourselves scrambling to dig out of this hole for years to come. I hope you're satisfied.

3. Southland Tales - 2006

It may be hard to remember, but there was a time when the entire film world was buzzing about Richard Kelly. Donnie Darko had worked up a feverish cult following on DVD after having had an unfortunate release concurrent with 9/11. Kelly's script for Domino was snatched up by Tony Scott, who proceeded to make a film that failed to crack a 6.0 user rating on IMDB, but eager fans chalked that up to the director not the scribe. We waited anxiously for Southland Tales, which from everything we heard was going to be enormous in scope--so big, in fact, that there were going to be a series of graphic novels that would come out beforehand to lay the groundwork for his magnum opus.

But the reaction was so overwhelmingly bad that I was was scared off until video where I watched as a mutual dare/suicide pact. This was my response after seeing it (when this blog was still clumsily walking a line lacking the requisite focus to have a semi-decent following):

Now hopefully (for you), the quote in the title is unfamiliar. If it does ring a bell, I'm sorry. That line is said not once, not twice, but three times in the most incomprehensible film ever made. Based on what the filmmaker said, this was a film that was supposed to be all things. Comedy. Thriller. Satire. Action film. What it ends up being is an utter piece of garbage.

The 'it' of which I speak is Southland Tales, and trust me, you do not want to see it.

Going in, the Old Lady, J-Bone, and I knew that we were about to watch a movie that was reportedly bad. That being said, I think we all were fairly open-minded and were expecting to find at least a few redeeming qualities. What we were treated to was essentially what would happen if Brett Ratner's ambitious, half-tard brother made an homage to Brazil. A disaster.

And all of us liked Donnie Darko. Sure it was convoluted and had some plot holes, but it was still enjoyable at the very least.

Southland Tales is anything but enjoyable. It clocks in at 2:15 (maybe more, my brain was hurting a lot by the time the movie was over), and I can safely say that there was only one scene that was actually good--and the faux domestic disturbance between Wood Harris and Amy Poehler was hilarious only because of my boy Avon Barksdale's gesticulating. The rest of the film is basically a series of events that take place involving characters leading up to this huge explosion, only there is absolutely no tension, and even if you are following what's going on and can makes sense of it there is simply nothing of any interest whatsoever.

I wanted to walk out of Pirates of the Caribbean 2 after about half an hour. I wanted to shoot myself after about fifteen minutes of Southland Tales. I guess I wasn't much of a pimp.

But I did finish the piece of shit, so I guess there's that.

This movie was completely and utterly worthless. If you need a reminder, here's the trailer:

I mean, Jesus Christ, he wasted The Rock and the opportunities that should have arisen from having Sarah Michelle Gellar play a porn star.

2. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - 2008

Cinematically speaking, this film comes as close to travelling back in time and raping your 12-year-old self as anything else could. It's like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg got together and decided that they were going to tie you down into a chair, murder your boyhood dog, and then skullfuck its corpse.


When trying to come up with anything positive to say about IJ:KoCS when initially reviewing it, I could only muster the following:

Shit script aside, there really isn't a lot to like about this film. Shia LaBeouf did what he could with a crap role loaded with cliche-ridden, greaser dialogue. Cate Blanchett's hair looked good. There's something about Ray Winstone I generally like, I guess.

This film single-handedly ruined a treasured (perhaps unjustly so) franchise from twenty years ago, ushered a new phrase into the pop-culture lexicon to augment and possibly rival "jumping the shark" ("nuking the fridge"), and made grown men cry. It gave us a leaden, humorless, and geriatric Indiana Jones complete with a horrible Harrison Ford performance that probably would have been better suited for the portion of Regarding Henry just after he is shot but before he starts to get his bearings about him. There are child-pandering transgressions here that are far more egregious than Jar-Jar Binks and the Ewoks combined, like the moronic vine-swinging sequence.

In short, fuck this movie.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Dead Man's Chest - 2006

I wrote the following diatribe on IMDB within hours of walking out of the theater:

This film is like having a fat man who ate at IHOP run a marathon and then drop a diarrhea dump on your chest and proceed to use your face as toilet paper

I should preface this review by saying that I was indifferent as to how I might feel about this film going into it. I thought the first film was fairly good. It was entertaining, but nothing that made me yearn for a second one. That being said, I hadn't read a review of this film (and still haven't) and had only heard that it had received mixed reviews. I had tempered expectations going into the theater, but I was certainly open to a good time.

A good time was not had. This film was quite simply awful. I have not seen anything in a long time that made me marvel at the fact that it was actually the finished product of a gigantic summer film churned out by a Hollywood Studio. I saw X-Men 3. While that was dreadful, this was eons past X3 in terms of excrement put to celluloid.

The plot was akin to a second-grader's class project. There was zero character development and not a single moment in which you thought you were seeing an original thought projected onto the screen. While it is a sequel, at some point the things that happen to the characters should matter, and if something bad happens to a character, the events that have molded him or her to that point should affect the audience somehow. Instead, the tools responsible for this screenplay have events happen without emotionally investing the audience in any way, shape, or form as to the fate of the characters on-screen, simply hoping that writing an event will somehow tug at the heart-strings of the audience without ever having to earn it.

I don't know that it is entirely the filmmakers' fault, because it seems that Verbinski & Co. were tied to some P.O.S. script that was churned out in a matter of days to get the cameras rolling, so Disney could bend the movie-goer over and sodomize them while getting paid for it. In the place of an actual story, they were probably told to blow up the film with mind-numbing action sequences and lame special effects.

To add insult to injury, the film clocks in at a mere two-and-a-half hours, which for a film with a plot wouldn't bother me in the least, but when you can write out the entire plot of this film in a matter of moments, seeing that paper-thin storyline stretched into 150 minutes is unbearable.

I could even make an exception to all of the aforementioned gripes and say that there was something in the film worthwhile if there was one performance from the cast that was mildly amusing. Alas, there is not. The actors all seem to have mailed it in, including Depp, who had a single chuckle-worthy moment as a follow-up to an Oscar-nominated turn in the previous Pirates outing.

***********SPOILER ALERT*************** When it comes down to it, all you'll get from this film is an obscenely long prologue to Pirates of the Caribbean 3: The Search for Spock--I mean Jack, because the entire plot of this atrocious piece of refuse is enough to fill a mere introduction to a real story.

Now, as one could imagine, I did not bother with the third, At World's End. I am sure that it would make the list, but one of these is enough.

I still feel like I did when I wrote that. This was a wretched film. This was, by far, the worst movie of this past decade, and it's not even close.

Man on Film: The Joker

This is the first of what I anticipate to be a couple of post-scripts to my review of The Dark Knight. I probably rushed the review, which is ironic since it took so long to actually get around to writing it. I have seen it three times now, the first occasion being on the Sunday of its opening weekend. I saw it another two times over this past weekend, and it took that long to really feel like I could start on something somewhat substantive. Unfortunately, I decided it would be a good idea to write the review last night at about 1:00 am. At any rate, here goes the first appendix to my gushing over The Dark Knight...

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Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker is historically great. Sure, this is an en vogue statement. He died tragically young. The buzz behind his turn was deafening. The climate was obviously ripe for this groundswell of acclaim.

There is also a general public yearning to pay respect to the posthumous performances of those who have passed, even when such adoration is not warranted. It's the same kind of mindset that governs the voting for the Oscars with what amounts to semi-annual career achievement awards given out to undeserving performances.

Ledger's performance operates entirely outside of that sphere of thought. Anyone who saw Brokeback Mountain could see his capacity for inspiring awe in an audience, as his performance was the one that pulled that film out of the realm of the ordinary. Granted his track record was anything but spotless, but it often seemed like the material was beneath his skill-level. This material is not. The anarchic, amoral villainy of the Joker in Nolan's Batman universe is so unsettling and unpredictable that perhaps a lesser actor could have emblazened the Joker into the collective psyche of the film-going public. I'm not sure that many other actors would have gone to the great lengths that Ledger did in placing himself in that mindset, though.

This Joker goes into the pantheon of movie villains. Its home there is instantaneously apparent. Put him in the conversation with last year's chilling Anton Chigurh, Nurse Ratched, or Regan in The Exorcist and the others on the shortlist for greatest villains in the cinema's history.

First, it is probably necessary to determine what separates Ledger's Joker from Nicholson's. Nicholson was all fine and dandy. It was perfectly in tone with Burton's vision. He stole the show, much like you could argue Ledger does in The Dark Knight. He had fun with the Joker, and I don't think there would have been many arguing against Nicholson having owned the role. Where Nicholson's Joker is in line with Burton's somewhat more overt comic book tone, Ledger's Joker is legitimately scary in Nolan's slightly more contemporary starkly realistic take on the franchise.

In his largely faceless introductory scene, we are introduced to the Joker in a sepia-tinged daylight bank robbery that would have fit more in a modern crime epic directed by the likes of Scorsese or Ridley Scott than in a superhero flick. It is this scene in which we are introduced to the brashly unpredictable actions of the Joker. His reputation precedes him, or at least the revelation of his face. As each henchman perishes at the hand of another once his utility to the heist has run its course, there is no pause in judging this a different Joker. The ballsiness of his plan to rob a mob-run bank when combined with the fact that he systematically eliminates five of his own men over the run of the first six minutes of the film take care of any hesitancy to view him in an entirely unique light. The fact that his own henchmen are gossiping about him as if he's a spectre lend an air of mystery and unease to him before his face is even shown. And even though you kind of know that man whose back is to the screen on that street corner in the open is the Joker, his initial facelessness lends to that mysteriousness.

His proposition to the mob bosses that follows is boldly hilarious and emboldens the impression that he truly follows no code. His shockingly funny magic trick and his calling out of squealers show that there is no fear in this Joker. Each time he flashes his lizard-like tongue action that marks the entire performance or every time he swoons quasi-drunkenly you can't help but marvel at the flair Ledger embodies the role with.

As the movie rolls on and his special brand of havoc is unleashed on Gotham City, the thing that sticks out is the sheer lawlessness his actions are meant to elicit. With each domino his actions topple, men and women are meant to forsake all rules of a morally-driven society in favor of a primal survivalism. His recruitment exercise, his ferry experiment, and ultimately his deconstruction of the white knight are all motivated by the sport of forcing chaos upon those who try to hold fast to a moral code. The harder they hold on, the harder the Joker hopes to make them fall, and his success is what strikes fear in the audience the most.

Amazingly, at the same time that fear lies deep within, there is the surface reaction of laughter at the Joker's way of carrying himself. While his motive is unnerving on a basic level, the way he carries himself is endearing. You at times find yourself almost rooting for the Joker to succeed. As he blows up a hospital, you find yourself laughing. He does crazy-ass shit. He stops by the wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser after having a gun to his head and follows his hand cleaning by blowing up the hall behind him. He dances maniacally over his shocked henchman as Batman lays on the ground. He burns a mountain of his own money with Lao on top of it because he simply didn't need it to begin with.

And maybe the beauty of the performance lies in that duality. The audience falls in love with the sociopath and perhaps that's the most disturbing aspect of the whole performance. Regardless, it is a sublime performance that has clearly struck a chord if you can judge that by the box office receipts.

Man on Film: The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan's second Batman film is breathtaking. From its opening bank robbing sequence in which the Joker is introduced to the noble self-sacrifice of Batman to end the film, Nolan has crafted a daringly dark film filled with sociopathic chaos set off by the actions of Heath Ledger's sublimely villainous turn as the Joker. In between those points, there is not a wasted moment with each shot, scene, word, and gesture being absolutely necessary and deftly exectued. In a two hour and twenty minute film, that is an astonishing accomplishment in and of itself.

And maybe the film has its negligible flaws--the continuation of Bale's scrambled voice while in Batman mode, the general dullness of Rachel Dawes as a character, the slightly big leap that the viewer has to make to buy into Harvey Dent's descent--but those complaints are minor and ultimately forgettable when they have been outshone so brightly by everything that succeeds. The list of success is not a short one. The screenplay is exceptionally smart and has great emotional depth. The score is phenomenal. The opening sequence with the eventual reveal of the Joker is extraordinarily sharp and masterfully sets the tone for the entire film. All of the action is edited superbly and choreographed seamlessly. There is little to no detachment when Bale is in suit or an effect is being inserted into the film--the dive into and escape from Lao's tower fortress in Hong Kong is convincing at all times. The starkness in Wally Pfister's cinematography gives this film a feeling of realism that no other superhero film even remotely approaches.

Just as in the first film, Christian Bale imbues his Bruce Wayne/Batman with a selfless determination to thwart the evils in Gotham that makes this film work. Without his realistically innate optimism and faith in man, The Dark Knight and its predecessor fall on their faces. As much as there are other great performances in this film, without the steady grounding of Christian Bale, this film would have failed.

The relationship between Michael Caine's Alfred and Bale's Bruce Wayne is also integral to the film. In addition to providing much of the comic relief in what is otherwise a relatively dark film, the variously maternal and paternal wisdom that Alfred provides the hero with allows Wayne to make the right decisions. And to say that Caine adds a certain degree of class and pedigree to the film should go without saying.

When speaking of class, the contributions of the oft misused Morgan Freeman--I am hard-pressed to come up with more than a role or two that he has done between The Shawshank Redemption and his playing of Lucius Fox that were even remotely worthy of him--and the chameleon Gary Oldman should not be overlooked. Freeman and Caine can be so convincingly authoritative that no disbelief need ever be suspended when words spill forth from their mouths. Luckily, the screenplay is so well thought out that there is no occasion in which either should not be believed. Gary Oldman has so thoroughly disappeared into his role as Jim Gordon that you could place him in "The Wire" as one of the few doing things right and he'd be right at home.

The public faces of the quest for justice are also solid. Maggie Gyllenhaal does what she can with a mostly archetypal character, and aside from an interrogation that sticks out slightly in a tonal sense, her Rachel Dawes is one that does not irritate. For most people, that is a step up from Katie Holmes. Where Rachel Dawes is not
a particularly well-rounded character, Aaron Eckhart gets to explore a wide range of emotion as Harvey Dent, upon whom hope for Gotham hinges precariously.

Without these performances maybe the film wouldn't be great. Without the performance of Heath Ledger as the Joker, the film wouldn't come even remotely close to the heights it reaches. Ledger's unnerving turn as the ultimate "agent of chaos" absolutely places this film into the canon. While certainly helped by the hushed chaos of the often single-note score that simmers under much of his action, the physicality and speech patterns that the late Ledger chose to inject into his Joker puts anything Nicholson did in Burton's film to shame. When he crashes Dent's fund-raising party at Bruce Wayne's penthouse, he does so with such whimsical malice that you can't help but react with laughter while feeling a sincere fear. The beauty of his entire turn is that as utterly scary as his actions are there is an undeniable draw to his sociopathy. While absolutely fucked up, his pencil trick is absolutely hilarious.

It is from the Joker that much of the horror of The Dark Knight is derived. While much of the action in the film is the result of retaliation against all that Batman has helped to do, the horror that the Joker unfurls on Gotham once he's given free reign by the cowering mob bosses is what is unnerving. Everything he forces upon people is meant to undermine the human moral code. He pits man against man repeatedly, taking away the perception of choice and imposing a much more primal survival instinct in its place. The fear of a society without a moral compass is so much scarier than anything in a slasher, and the depths of amorality that the Joker tries to take Gotham City to are stark to say the least.

The citizens of Gotham are justifiably panicked in The Dark Knight, which makes Batman's belief in them ever more moving. While they certainly give him hope in the end, his sacrifice for the betterment of Gotham is undeniably affecting, and his love for man is the force that carries you out of the theater with a strange swell of bittersweet pride in the actions of a character in a movie.