Batman: The Dark Knight

This is not a movie review. This is an account of the visceral experience that is The Dark Knight.

Why am I not reviewing Batman? Because you should have already made up your mind about whether or not you’re going to see it. If the biggest opening weekend in movie history isn’t enough to make you curious, then any high-flown praise I can offer you won’t be enough, either. But don’t see it for the hype. See it because it’s good. I’ve seen some great movies this summer – Wall-E and Hellboy II to name two – and this one tops them.

Although I was dying to see Batman on opening day, I didn’t sleep the night before because of some weird insomnia, so my brother, his friend, and I got tickets to see it Saturday night. I prepared myself for the event by not watching any previews, not following the Harvey Dent ad campaigns, and not reading any reviews. I wanted an utterly fresh experience.
We picked a small local theater – not too flashy but guaranteed to not have huge lines. We arrived at 7 pm, just as the previews were starting, and got some pretty decent seats. We spent our ride there discussing other people’s driving habits and making sarcastic remarks about the scenic route our driver had chosen. On the way back, no one spoke.

One reviewer called Batman “exhausting,” and it is. My brother first saw the movie on opening night, and he repeated all the way to the theater that Saturday that he slept like a baby after he first saw. After the movie, I suppose I was drained. Something can indeed be said for just literally leaning forward during a third of a movie and watching tense scene after tense scene unfold.

Two and a half hours after we put the quarters into the parking meter, we came out of the theater. “That was awesome!” my brother said. “Every time they had the chance to do something right with the script, they took it,” his friend, a total film buff, said. “You know, I feel like if I talk any more, I won’t be able to say anything about it,” my brother said. And then no one spoke. We drove back in complete silence.

When we got home, my dad asked us how the movie was. “Great,” I said, as if that word meant anything. “I can’t talk about it.” I still have a hard time talking about it, and thinking about it. It’s the kind of movie that wrenches your attention away from its flaws with high-stakes scenarios that matter to you, even if you’re not particularly partial to the characters.

What kind of movie is Batman? I wondered that, too. It isn’t a superhero movie, not completely. Batman seems shoved aside in favor of the Joker, who behaves more like a serial killer than a super villain. Some of his plans reminded me of the Jigsaw Killer’s choose-or-die plans in Saw. So, is this a crime movie? A horrific thriller? It’s a movie about idols and hope and justice and making the “right” choice when it feels so much like the wrong one. It’s a movie where the villain only cares for anarchy and chaos, yet he always has a plan.

I saw the movie for the second time the Monday after the premiere, and this time I went to an AMC theater. Needless to say, by the time the movie started, almost every seat was taken. I came out smiling from ear to ear.

I will never get over Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne and his feigned arrogance. After watching Batman a second time, though, I wish Bruce had more of a social life. Sure, he hangs out with models and ballet dancers, but aside from Alfred and Lucius, he has no one. I couldn’t even imagine this Batman making any kind of time for a Robin. He barely has enough time to sleep.

And, after this movie, I don’t think any one else will ever be able to play the Joker. As some fans put it, it was as if Heath weren’t even in this movie. It was the Joker through and through. And though I kept searching his face for any signs of the actor I’d seen in A Knight’s Tale and 10 Things I Hate About You, I saw no resemblance. Even the brief glimpse we get of the Joker with his unpainted face looks like the Joker with an unpainted face – not like Heath Ledger. I appreciated every little quirk, the licking of the lips, the slowly opening eyes, the skewed shoulders, and the way the Joker climbs into the bus after taking out Gotham General and bounces in the seat, even though the audience can only see a shadow through the bus window.

But please, don’t see this for the actors. If you do, some of the others might disappoint you. I prefer Maggie Gyllenhall immensely over Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, but she has no chemistry with either Batman or Harvey Dent. So when Batman freaked out that she’d been kidnapped, I had to remind myself that he actually cared about Rachel – because I didn’t.

The Dark Knight’s plot is tightly woven. Sometimes I didn’t believe pieces of it (the huge sonar machine?) but a second viewing answered most of my questions. My dad had questions about where the Joker got his ammunition and how he set up so many elaborate bombs – and where did the Joker come from anyway? – but my answer to that is, the Joker is an “agent of chaos,” as he calls himself. He is unthinkable evil, an almost all-powerful evil. He comes from nowhere, making up a different story for his scars each time. And, anyway, this is a superhero movie. Thankfully, you can ask a lot of questions of the Dark Knight – which is what makes it so great – but you can’t ask TOO many.

Ultimately, Batman is an experience. It’s the kind of movie that you feel in your gut is a great movie, but afterward, you wonder if you could ever watch it again. The last time I felt that way was with Pan’s Labyrinth, but Pan’s Labyrinth was just a hard movie to watch because it was so beautiful yet so up-front in its horror. Batman is just a trip. It’s physically draining. It’s anarchy and it’s a long, powerful ride, and it’s great.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

And if you haven’t yet, watch this movie. Let’s make this the biggest opening week ever.

 

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

I write this as my brother plays the Beowulf video game on his XBox 360. Ah, Beowulf – a movie that gets more unintentionally funny every time I watch it.

I’ve been waiting for Hellboy II since Hellboy came out in 2004. And I’ve been waiting even harder since I saw this preview.

The costumes and the scenery convinced me that this movie was going to be brilliant, as did the dramatic pacing and the Rammstein song playing in the background. And brilliant in scope it is, although the characters are flatter this time around, and at times, it seems that Guillermo del Toro is struggling to mesh two movies together – one that explodes with vivid magic, and one that is firmly grounded in our world’s comic books.

It seems reviving either huge armies or huge monsters from past civilizations has become a bit of a cliché. Just before Hellboy II, for example, came the preview for The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, another movie about reviving a lost army.

Briefly, in Hellboy II, Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), an elf, seeks revenge against mankind for destroying the natural world, so he decides to revive the golden army. His sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) tries to stop him by running away with some of the artifacts he needs to revive the army. Meanwhile, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and Liz (Selma Blair) deal with their developing relationship and encounter the typical problems – living together and possibly raising a family.

Luke Goss, surprisingly handsome once the make-up comes off (or, dare I say, mysteriously so with the make-up on?), played Nomak in Blade II, in which Ron Perlman also acted, and he makes Prince Nuada an empathetic character, just as he did Nomak. With his gold and red eyes, long white hair, pale skin, and pointed ears, not to mention the scars, I expected him to be a vampire-like character, although he came off as more noble and elegant, being a self-exiled elf.

Another newcomer was Johann Krauss, an ectoplasmic “person” crammed into what resembles on old diving suit. He’s voiced by Seth MacFarlane, something I did not find distracting in the least – indeed, although Johann became a bit of a one-note character despite his surprises, I enjoyed having him on Red’s team.

What surprised me to discover was that Doug Jones played the Pale Man, that monstrous creature with eyes in its hands, in Pan’s Labyrinth, while here he plays the less frightening (and occasionally C-3PO-ish) Abe Sapien and the just-plain-freaky Angel of Death. Abe gets more screentime than he did in the first Hellboy, becoming more human than sidekick, although the movie’s finale doesn’t do justice to his personal struggles. I can only hope later movies will address that.

Watching this movie, I often felt like I was walking the line between immersion and disbelief. The movie begins with a background story told by Hellboy’s adoptive father, a technique that instantly had me on-guard since the young Hellboy seemed stiff – despite his expressive voice – and the dramatization of the story reminded me of the out-of-place CGI fight scenes in The Protector. Later, Hellboy and Co. investigate the disappearance (and presumable murders) of 70 guests at a fancy-pants auction where Prince Nuada showed up earlier (don’t worry, these aren’t spoilers, it’s all in the preview), and what ensues is a rather awkwardly-paced fight with some strange fairy creatures. Several expendables die in blatantly expendable-character deaths that are less fun than in the first movie, when I think we at first hoped to bond with some of Hellboy’s human teammates. The awkward pacing – some scenes should really have been tightened up – threw me off and seemed to hold me at arm’s length from the movie.

But I really wanted to like this movie, and eventually it gave me reasons. Some of these were, of course, the incredible monsters that appeared. The creativity that went into the designs was unbelievable, and I’m sure everyone has already seen and been blown away by the strange angel of death creature that has eyes embedded in its wings. A prophetic monster that should have had some more screen time, albeit not all at once.

There’s no arguing with Hellboy’s nonchalant and proud personality, either, or the sense of humor these movies have. Hellboy’s confrontation with Johann is perhaps my favorite moment in the movie.

Still, as I mentioned earlier, I sometimes felt as if Guillermo del Toro were trying to fit two different movies together. Some scenes and landscapes were breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly imaginative and didn’t seem to belong in a movie that essentially takes place in New York and New Jersey (and Ireland, for a bit), even if some locales were supposedly underground and hidden from human beings. I thought Prince Nuada’s world was sufficiently compelling to merit its own world separate from ours, sort of like an extension of the fairy tales told in Pan’s Labyrinth, yet for some reason his story was fitted against Hellboy’s. I don’t know how closely this movie aligns with the comic book, though, so I’ll leave off there.

In short, Hellboy II is a compelling movie that definitely has clichés – the ancient army, the superhero’s struggle to deal with public opinion (especially New Yorkers’ opinions), the relationship drama – but is saved by its relentless charm – the utter beauty of it all, and the quirky uniqueness of its characters. Although if I had filmed this, I would have raised the stakes and made it still more ominous (you’ll see what I mean once you watch the angel of death scene), perhaps Hellboy II just isn’t that kind of animal – it’s entertainment that isn’t meant to get you down, no matter the material it deals with (for instance, Hellboy is the son of the devil but does he mope around about his destiny?). Hellboy II certainly leaves hints of what may come for the characters in Hellboy III. Which I shall begin waiting for now.

 

The Foot Fist Way

My dad and I went out for his birthday and since we both do martial arts (me: Isshinryu karate, my dad: kempo) we went to see The Foot Fist Way. The only theaters near me that are showing it are in New York City, so we saw it at the AMC on 42nd St. It’s a HUGE theater, with plenty of long escalators and attendants ushering you in and out of the theaters, up stairs, and even down in elevators. It’s twelve bucks a ticket with no student discounts. I didn’t check the concessions stand prices.

The Foot Fist Way tells the story of Tae Kwon Do instructor Fred Simmons and his two lives – the one as a hard-ass Tae Kwon Do instructor, the other as an asshole husband. But when his wife cheats on him, his personal problems start leaking into his life at his martial arts school.

The movie was shot in 19 days with a $70,000 budget, and it shows in the grainy footage and, well, all areas of the movie, but I wouldn’t say that’s to the movie’s detriment. It’s just something to keep in mind, that it isn’t 100% polished. Some scenes could have been shorter, some pauses needed to be longer for comedic impact, etc.

Eh…okay, so I’ll get down to the nitty-gritty. I admit that having my dad around for this movie may have skewed my perspective on how funny it was (you know, sometimes instead of laughing I might have been wondering what he thought of a certain joke and whether I’d get in trouble for it later), but we both generally agreed that it was a strange mix of the funny and the horribly unfunny. A lot of the characters were rude jerks, and Simmons’s marriage problems weren’t as laughable as they might have been.

The New York Times compared it to Napoleon Dynamite and similarly, some of the characters were caricatures, but not quite as abstract as those in ND. Really, I could almost imagine this guy teaching TKD, and I was very, very happy that my sensei, despite being a hard-ass, is nothing like this guy.

So, the movie may not have been as funny as it could have been, but it had that strange oh-my-God-what-are-they-doing-now feeling to it. As a martial artist, I enjoyed watching the goings-on at the TKD school and the occasional fighting (but honestly, when that one guy showed he couldn’t control his violence, Mr. Simmons should have beat the shit out of him). What I missed at the end was a final fight between Mr. Simmons and Mr. Adulterer (or Adulteress, as Simmons calls him) and a little more closure than the final speech Simmons gives that really has nothing to do with anything we’ve learned about the characters. So…maybe the movie finds a good deal of its humor in its irony. The TKD students talk about perseverance and self-control, and the movie is split into sections marked with those headlines – very ironically-titled sections, since Simmons, for example, beats the crap out of a little boy because he thinks the kid’s dad has been messing around with Simmons’s wife Suzie (a perfect mix of the bitchy and the sweetly apologetic).

I still haven’t made up my mind about this movie, so for now I will recommend watching it if you do TKD or another martial art or if you’re looking for a relatively funny film, but try to find it for less than $12 a ticket (which is a ridiculous price for ANY film). Also, please let me know what else you want to know about the film. I’m still torn between saying it definitely wasn’t as funny as pre-release reviews said it was, and saying it was a good short indie film.

 

Chocolate – Prachya Pinkaew’s Touching Martial Arts Film Starring Jeeja, a.k.a. the female Tony Jaa

Directed by Prachya Pinkaew and starring Nicharee “Jeeja” Vismistananda, Chocolate is basically a story about love. Yes, it includes some cool fighting sequences – who wasn’t awed by that scene in the commercial where Jeeja knees someone into what looks like an air shaft? But the sequences are not as hard or as fast as Tony Jaa’s. They felt a tad cautious in comparison and less flowing. Yet not everyone can be Tony Jaa, and I’m happy with Jeeja as Jeeja.

Chocolate’s basic story follows the voluptuous Zin who works for a Thai crime boss. She falls in love with a Japanese yakuza, but her jealous boss promises to hurt her if he ever catches her with that yakuza. Zin sends her yakuza boyfriend back to Japan to protect him. But out of Zin’s affair with the yakuza is born Zen (Jeeja), an adorable autistic girl that takes to mimicking the Muay Thai kickboxers that practice next door. When her mother gets sick, Zen and her childhood friend try to gather money for her mother’s medication by collecting the debts owed to Zin. Of course, no one wants to listen to an autistic girl and her roly-poly friend, so Zen resorts to violence for the sake of her mother.

The storyline is much better than a typical martial arts movie’s. Compare this story of an autistic girl protecting her mother to the director’s previous films Ong-Bak and The Protector with Tony Jaa. I understood Tony Jaa’s quests for the stolen Buddha statue and elephant in each movie, but I won’t deny that people laughed in the theater when he demanded his elephant back from the villain.

The first part of Chocolate, before the fighting started, actually moved me – although I did get a bit antsy waiting for the fighting to start. The beginning has several well-paced and well-placed montages overlaid with sweet, though faintly old-fashioned, music.

Once the movie ended, I realized how much it had relied on family dynamics, and how much I had appreciated watching Zin transform from a seductive beauty to a loving, cancer-ravaged single mother. The heartbreak at the end for me was realizing that Zen was just a girl defending her mother; she never thought of herself as a martial artist.

I would recommend this movie to anyone. I was a little disappointed with the fighting sequences, but I realize that once you’ve seen Tony Jaa fight, even a girl touted as the female Tony Jaa can’t match him. Not so much because she’s a girl, but because he’s Tony Jaa. Nonetheless, I enjoyed watching someone in a dress take out a gang of bullies after catching a knife in her hand, and I hope Jeeja goes on to make more powerful martial arts films, films that address the plot as much as they do the fighting.

 

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – Spoilers -

First, apologies for the lack of updates. I took an extra half class the past semester (Japanese!) and that with karate with a general sense of ennui and constant daydreaming and confusion about what I’m supposed to be doing with my life combined to make me not want to write much… now, let’s get on with it:

I think, in a small way, that I grew up with Indiana Jones, watching the movies on TV so often that I didn’t buy the DVDs until only recently. I remember that when I was really little, we went to an Indiana Jones performance at a theme park and I cried so much when the giant boulder rolled out to squish him that my parents had to take me out of the theater. (Now that I think of it, sorry to the anyone I bothered in the audience! lol)

And, of course, I’ve always loved Harrison Ford, especially after Star Wars (the infamous “I know”), and though his voice has that old man gurgle to it now, I still love watching him on-screen. But I knew that the new Indiana Jones movie just wouldn’t be the same, maybe after I read on I Watch Stuff what the running time would be for the new movie. And watching the movie confirmed my suspicion – two hours is much too long for a strictly action movie, especially if it’s Indiana Jones. I think several scenes could have either been cut or shortened.

For example, the chase sequence in the rain forest. Honestly, who came up with the part where monkeys teach Shia how to swing from vines?? Utterly ridiculous and really, not a very Indy kinda thing. And the fencing sequence? Please. That went on too long and I kept wondering why someone didn’t just hit the brakes on one of the vehicles. “Riposte!” Again, please.

At one point in the movie, it hit me that maybe we as a culture are too old for Indiana Jones movies. That thought popped into my head after the movie made some ridiculous cultural conflations, which I guess maybe the old Indiana Jones movies did, too, though I was never as sharply aware of them as I was now: Indy travels to Peru, where the background music is Mexican, and a guy in a Peruvian graveyard does Brazilian capoeira to beat the crap out of Shia LaBeouf. And Indy says he learned Quechua from a guy who was riding with Pancho Villa (why would a Peruvian native be riding with the Mexican Villa? likelier Indy would have learned Maya, huh). Maybe when the original Indiana movies were released, this would have been okay, but now, with such a large hispanic population in the country and such utterly OBVIOUS “mistakes,” I left the theater feeling a bit bitter. Maybe because I’m Latina? I felt betrayed to be slighted by a saga of movies I’ve loved since I was little.

Nonetheless, I was very, very happy to see the return of Marion Ravenwood! I’d always thought she was the best “Jones” girl, though it was a shock to see how much Karen Allen has aged; it isn’t so noticeable on Ford, for me, because I’ve watched him age through movies, but I honestly don’t think I’ve seen any other of Allen’s movies besides Raiders. So, I thought Crystal Skull could have explored the aging theme a bit more than it did. That is, I was a bit touched when Indy’s colleague says they’ve reached the age when life stops handing you things and starts taking them away. I guess a message the movie tries to give is that there’s always something more out there, since Indy finds a son and a wife by the end, and Shia even nearly puts on Indy’s hat.

Shia as Mutt. He wasn’t bad. In fact, my favorite scene in the film was the greaser-jock fight. So Shia wasn’t bad, he was just given some bad scenes (the monkey swinging, the fencing) and a bad nickname. But in the end, he was forgettable. As was the movie in general, I’d say, except for the resolution to the Indy-Marion romance, and…the lead-plated refrigerator. This I will not spoil. It was probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in any movie. It probably shouldn’t have been done, to tell you the truth, but in a small way, it was worth it just to contemplate the utter improbability of it.

I know my reviews tend to meander, so I’ll try to sum up. This is a watch-able movie. Please, PLEASE try not to ask any questions of it. I think it may have more holes in its reasoning than any other Indiana Jones movie. If you can suspend your disbelief – and I mean really suspend it – you’ll have a blast watching this. Otherwise, you’ll value the movie for a few refreshing and interesting scenes (I loved the search for the box at the beginning), and then wish they’d cut the rest.

 

The Foot Fist Way

A new movie called The Foot Fist Way is coming out soon…. I’m really excited!

WARNING: FOLLOWING LINK IS FOR A RED BAND TRAILER. DON’T WATCH IT IF YOU’RE NOT MATURE ENOUGH.

Favorite quote:
(On Tae Kwon Do) “It’s the best of all martial arts.”
“I hear jiu jitsu’s really good for balance.”
“No. Jiu jitsu sucks.”

Hahahahaha…

(P.S. Before anyone mistakes my meaning, I am indeed aware of jiu jitsu’s amazingness.)

 

Step Up 2 the Streets

Watch the last half hour. That’s it. Otherwise, an extremely predictable movie. I could write pages and pages on why the main character doesn’t seem like she belongs there, why (as my friend noted) her speech at the Streets is ridiculous because it’s basically in defense of middle-class America… It’s really a terribly plotted movie, with some neat dances thrown in at the end. You don’t care about the characters much, except Moose, and I spent most of it wondering why there aren’t any movies about latinos/blacks that don’t up the whole racial thing. I mean, please. The white girl who definitely does NOT look like she knows what it’s like to live on the streets. Really, a terrible movie. Just watch the last twenty minutes.

 

Why Haven’t I Seen These Movies Yet?? Chocolate and Mirageman

Chocolate

What looks like an amazing Thai movie with a kickass female fighter (actress “Jeeja” who apparently trained five years for this role). The trailer says “real injuries” – although it isn’t a requirement for it to be real for me to see a martial arts movie, it sure helps. The movie was already released in Thailand, to my knowledge, but has yet to reach my computer screen.

Mirageman

An amazing Chilean movie that I’ve been dying to see – when does this come out in Chile? I love how everyone gets kicked in the face during the commercial. I also love one of the taglines… Se acabó el hueveo.

Also, I have no idea what on earth is up with these two related Barney clips. Lol, Barney kills Chapulín Colorado. Lol, Mirageman beats the SHIT out of Barney.

And…

Translation: Fuck the panic button.

 

The Princess Bride – Awesome DVD Cover

I know this DVD came out a while ago – heck, I bought it last year, but I just noticed it again sitting on the shelf above my computer, and I just had to comment on the brilliant way the cover was done. Not only can it be flipped upside down and viewed as reflections of the two lovers in either orientation, but the TITLE itself reads “The Princess Bride” no matter how you orient the DVD. Whoever designed the title is a genius and should be commended. This reminds me of that FedEx post I had a while ago about that hidden arrow in the logo. It’s just sooo cool!

 

R.I.P. Heath Ledger

See the New York Times article reporting it.

I’d rather not comment on the circumstances (strange as they seem), but I can say I will really miss Heath Ledger. I remember seeing him in A Knight’s Tale for the first time, and most recently in Brokeback Mountain and I was waiting on the edge of my seat to see him in The Dark Knight (which IMDB says is in post-production now). He was a great actor whom I thought was really on his way to the top, with amazing skills, and I’m really going to miss him.