Review: The Dark Knight Rises (dir. Christopher Nolan)

Story: Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) lives in recluse. Mentally and physically broken by his years as Batman he sees Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) clean up the streets of Gotham. However, the arrivals of the gymnastic burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and of the cruel mercenary Bane (Tom Hardy) force Batman out of retirement. The question is if he is able to rise up again and confront his present foes as well as the demons of his past.

If The Dark Knight Rises is quite a disappointment, then it is so because of the enormous expectations of fans, and the high bar set by its predecessors, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008). In fact, to call ‘TDKR’ a bad film is unjustified. It is a good summer blockbuster; by far the best of this summer. It grabs such fodder as The Avengers and The Amazing Spider-man in their necks and scoulingly sends them back to kindergarten. And yet it disappoints.

The biggest let down for me was that director Christopher Nolan does not chart new territories and themes in TDKR. Rather, he returns to the issues already covered in quite some extent in Batman Begins. And although Bruce Wayne / Batman does grow as a character, I miss the expansion to Batman’s universe and psychology that made The Dark Knight so very special. From a storytelling point of view it makes sense to make the circle complete, and Nolan does not hesitate to emphasize this, using quite a big number of flashbacks to Batman Begins. But I think he is mistaken to pressume that his audience is not already overly familiar with the previous films.

Valuable time is lost with these flashbacks, and although I do not think that The Dark Knight Rises is too long, I do think it could have spent some of its running time (a whopping 164 minutes) in a more effective manner. On many an occasion, especially in the climactic final hour, Nolan falls back on cheap short-cuts in his staging of the battle over Gotham’s fate. On first viewing these moments may be mistaken for plot holes, but on second viewing they appear to be the result of cramped storytelling and shoddy editing. Unnecessary mistakes that could easily have been solved had Nolan allowed himself more time to stage these scenes properly and less time reinvoking worn down, and this trilogy unworthy, generic stereotypes.

Nolan likes to work with the same people over and over again: Story writer David Goyer, producer Emma Thomas, writer Jonathan Nolan (yes, the brother), composer Hans Zimmer, editor Lee smith and cinematographer Wally Pfister. If I would recommend Nolan to look for another editor if he continues in action films, I must also praise Wally Pfister. Pfister was nominated for an Oscar for The Dark Knight, and he won one for Inception, and in The Dark Knight Rises he delivers again. The vistas of a Gotham under siege are stunning. In cooperation with the special effects team Pfister does something extraordinary: the stunts and effects that in other films seem weightless and immaterial digital constructions have heft and weight and, consequently, realism in TDKR.

Nolan also prefers to work with actors he already knows. Of course he brings back Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (as Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred Pennyworth), but he also calls in the services of his Inception veterans Tom Hardy, Marion Cotillard (as business woman and love interest Miranda Tate) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (as Gotham city cop John Blake). And there are surprising cameos by some old characters as well. The only major new face is Anne Hathaway. And it must be said that, in such an enormous ensemble, it is Hathaway who stands out, next to Bale and Gorden-Levitt. The other actors suffer from the fact that their roles are perhaps slightly too marginal and underwritten. Tom Hardy is imposing, threatening and scary as Bane, but he can not rival Heath Ledger’s Joker. He should not want to either, and we should not expect it from him.

As an action spectacle, this film is stunning. Big set-pieces involve a chase scene with multiple motorcycles, a street battle between cops and thugs and, perhaps most memorable, a mid-air abduction in the opening sequence. We should not underestimate the contribution of composer Hans Zimmer to these scenes. The master of the genre almost overplays his hand with a thunderous score that drowns out bits of the dialogue, but the crucial word in this sentence is ‘almost’. Empire compared Zimmer’s soundtrack with an earthquake, and that is an appropriate metaphor. The music defies further description.

By not offering us something fundamentally new, apart from some interesting characters, Nolan deprives his film from the depth and the political commentary that The Dark Knight had. Complaints that TDKR is politically reactionary or conservative miss the point that there is actually a shocking lack of politics in this film. If there is any, it only serves as a masquerade of or a detraction from the actual plot, which then is too light to justify the epic ambitions of the film.

But Nolan does deliver emotionally. The fans who have made his films the huge successes that they are have invested in this world and in these characters. And although this individual film may not be able to match the quality of its predecessors, it does succeed in satisfyingly finishing this particular story of Bruce Wayne. Actually, it might be its strongest point (and this is the only small spoiler! I put into this review) that it finishes the story of Bruce Wayne, but not necessarily that of Batman. A relief for the studio and for the fans.

Final verdict: The Dark Knight Rises is a fitting and satisfying conclusion to what we can now call the best superheroe franchise to date. However, it is also demonstrably the weakest link in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and so it is with appropriate heartache that fans have to say goodbye to their holiday fling of three summers.

Trailer Tuesday: Lawless Prometheus Rises

Lawless

Dir. John Hillcoat. Starring: Shia LeBoeuf, Tom Hardy, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska & Gary Oldman

Release date NL: November 2012

 

Prometheus

Dir. Ridley Scott. Starring: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce & Idris Elba

Release date NL: 31 May 2012

 

The Dark Knight Rises

Dir. Christopher Nolan. Starring: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Marion Cotillard, Aidan Gillen & Liam Neeson

Release date NL: 20 July 2012

Trailer for The Dark Knight Rises online!!!

Quick analysis? This is gonna be dark stuff, with Bruce Wayne leaning on a cane. Michael Caine’s Alfred is in tears and Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is in a tight spot, politically. A masked Anne Hathaway whispers ominously, and then the shit hits the fan. The Arkham prioners are set loose on the streets of Gotham once more and it turns into a very nasty revolution.  With Batman getting Bane’s “permission to die”… Wow.

Most remarkable is how light the film looks. Batman used to lurk in the shadows: now he is brought into full daylight.

My only worry is about the CG on the collapsing football field and the flying Batwing-kinda-thing. That really needs some more polishing. But there is plenty of time for that in post-production, as The Dark Knight Rises is not set to premiere until July.

Update: The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan has a legendary reputation for secrecy about his future films. Plot details, characters and themes are often not known to the press and the public until the last few, more extensive, trailers arrive. All the more spectacular than that Nolan and his stars Christian Bale (Batman/Bruce Wayne) and Tom Hardy (bad guy Bane) spoke to Empire about the new Batman flick – The Dark Knight Rises – last month. This is what we’ve learned that we did not know yet…

1)      The Dark Knight Rises will take place eight years after the events of The Dark Knight. That is quite a surprise, given the suspenseful state in which the latter film left Batman: his reputation shattered and hunted by the police.

2)      The new film will find Bruce Wayne in a very bad state. Nolan and Bale have spoken about the way in which grief and guilt are the central elements ofWayne’s existence, and how he can no longer live his life like that.

3)      Bane is a terror and a menace. If the Joker was a psychological adversary for Batman, testing him to his principal and ethical limits, Bane will be an enemy that can actually hurt Batman physically. Tom Hardy spoke of the cracking of skulls and the ripping out of spines. Wow. Nolan goes Conan apparently, but Warner Bros. will insist on PG 13 rating and therefore I expect the violence to be mostly suggested rather than lingered on.

The Dark Knight Rises will conclude Nolan’s Batman trilogy that started with Batman Begins in 2005. The film will hit Dutch screens on July 25^th next year. Keep that date free!

 

 

Preview: The Dark Knight Rises

Last week Warner Bros. released the teaser poster for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, and yesterday they also put an HD version of the first teaser online. A shoddy low-quality version had already been leaked to the internet, but its quality was so bad that hardly anything could be seen or heard in it.

The new teaser still tells us little about the plot: there are some images from Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, and a voice-over by Liam Neeson that comes from the first film. Then: an image of Gary Oldman’s commissioner Gordon on a hospital bed: hurt, weak. He insists that Batman must come back, that they were “in this together”. An unseen Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) doubt whether Batman still exists. Then there are shots of someone climbing out of a hole and of Bane (Tom Hardy). One of his face and one of him approaching a stumbling Batman in an underground location.

And that is it. I am thrilled. I am very much looking forward to the film, yet I am afraid as well. Mostly because of the cast list. The Dark Knight Rises sees Bale returning as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and Gary Oldman, Morgan Freeman (Lucius Fox) and Michael Caine (Alfred) return as well.

Tom Hardy will be Bane, who in the comics is a genetically engineered super-soldier or villain. Anne Hathaway is cast as Selina Kyle, and may transform into Catwoman. Hathaway is new to Nolan, but Marion Cotillard and Joseph Gorden-Levitt are not: they worked with him on Inception. Gorden-Levitt will be police officer John Blake, and Cotillard will play Miranda Tate, in the comics also known as Talia Al Ghul, the estranged daughter of Ra’s Al Ghul, Batman’s enemy from Begins. Josh Pence is cast as a young Ra’s, and Liam Neeson is rumoured to return as the old version of the character.

Such long cast lists lead to problems; see last years Iron Man 2. All these well-known actors and characters can hardly all be given the screen time they need to develop their characters properly and play a major role in what still should be the story of Batman. At worst, we could get a mess of a film. However, considering Nolan’s disciplined style of filmmaking that is not likely. More likely is that the film will show an extreme version of the template of The Dark Knight and Inception, in which supporting characters’ emotional or personal development are sidelined in order for them to schematically inhabit the various political, moral or mythological points Nolan wants make.

Something else I fear is that Nolan might move away from the realistic tone of his previous Batman films, and indulge in the more metaphysical themes and plotlines some of the comics (for instance Frank Millar’s “The Dark Knight Returns”) offer. That is something I would not be fond of.

But I had similar fears back in 2007, when I first learned that Heath Ledger, whom I, at the time, only remembered as the teenage heart-throb from 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight’s Tale, would play The Joker, a role made iconic by Jack Nicholson. And I had my doubts about the pitch for Inception as well: A thriller set within the architecture of the mind? And in both cases my doubts and fears were met by great films. Let’s hope Nolan can do it again.

Strong Melodrama With Excellent Actors – the The Fighter review

Mark Wahlberg really wanted to do this movie. He went from studio to studio and from director to director with the script for The Fighter. He even kept in form for boxing for over five years, so that he’d be ready as soon as production could start. At some point Darren Aronofsky was set to direct the film, but he decided to do Black Swan. Probably a smart move, considering the visual and thematic resemblances of The Fighter to Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler.

Wahlberg eventually got David O. Russell to direct. Russell had worked with ‘Marky-Mark’ previously on Three Kings. Actors supporting Wahlberg in his turn as heavy-weight boxing champion Mickey Ward are Christian Bale, Melissa Leo and Amy Adams. All three of them got nominated for Oscars, and Bale and Leo deservedly bagged the awards as well.

The Fighter tells the story of the abovementioned Mickey Ward, whose biggest fight is not in the ring, but outside it. There he struggles with a dominant mother, who manages his fights, and the legacy of his older half-brother Dicky Ecklund: a local hero who once knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard but got addicted to methamphetamine and crack. Now Dicky trains Micky and the entire family (including seven hilariously trashy sisters) are supported by the money Mickey makes serving as a stepping stone to better and heavier fighters.

Of course, until a new love – Amy Adams – and a fight with his brother persuade Mickey to take an alternative path to boxing fame. The question is, can Mickey become world champion without the support and love of his family?

The Fighter is an excellent drama, with a superb cast. Wahlberg got robbed from an Oscar nomination. Amidst the mayhem and madness acted out by Leo, Bale and Adams he keeps a cool head. The others may get all the attention with their surrealistic rages, Wahlberg remains the sympathetic, real protagonist without whom the whole picture would descend into absurdist chaos. Which is not to say that Leo and Bale undeservedly won: mother Alice’s pain is felt as she tries to manage and support her white trash family, and Bale is amazing. He physically transformed into a drug addict, with all the jittery manners and nervousness injected into a body stripped from any muscle or fat it does not necessarily need to keep him alive.

The only drawback to The Fighter is that it is not really an original story. It is based on true events, but also feels at times as a remake of, or a tribute to both Rocky and Raging Bull. Although DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta of course became a champion despite himself, and Mickey becomes a champion because of himself, and despite his surroundings.

But even though you know how it is going to end, the fights themselves remain really tense, exciting and suspenseful. Boxing really is the most cinematic of sports, however you feel about the sport itself.

Shocking, but not because it is good or bad – the Hereafter review

Hereafter is not a very good film. But it is not as bad as many would have you believe. It ranks amongst the lesser of Clint Eastwood’s films, and the fact that he has two lesser films in the space of a year (Invictus preceeded Hereafter) may be a bad sign, but just as Invictus, Hereafter is not really a bad film.

It is a remarkably sentimental film, although Eastwood was never shy for sentimentalism in the last twenty years (only Mystic River has no sentimentality in it at all I believe). The new thing is that Hereafter is so conventionally sentimental, and so convolutedly plotted. The film tells the three, ultimately intertwining, stories of French journalist-with-a-near-death-experience Marie (Cecile de France), San Francisco based former medium George (Matt Damon) and London street kid Marcus (Frankie and George McLaren), who saw his twin brother Jason die in a traffic incident.

One thing that these stories show is that Clint Eastwood, for all his liberalism and openness to the rest of the world, is an essentially American filmmaker. The segments of the film that play in San Francisco show Eastwood on amazing form. The American blue collar working class milieu and the more up-scale middle class downtown scenes are handled with a care and sensitivity that is lacking from the scenes in Paris and London. Especially a scene involving a cooking class, a blindfold and Matt Damon carefully flirting with Melanie is breathtaking. Bryce Dallas Howard (The Village) is amazing as the damaged woman Melanie, who wants to connect to George, but stumbles upon the wall of isolation he has build around himself. Damon himself is on top form as well, proving once more that he is not just the most bankable actor in Hollywood, but also amongst the best of his generation, next to Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio. Giving this performance in Hereafter, just after his show-stopper turn in True Grit almost feels like bragging, or showing off.

Eastwood’s Paris however is superficial, and his direction in another language not as confident as it was in Letters from Iwo Jima. London is worse. Eastwood does not know which London he wants to show: landmark London, with its tourist highlights, or the underbelly of the East End. It does not help that the twins portraying Marcus and Jason speak as if they are at Hogwarts, rather than in 21^st century London.

The biggest problem of the film however is the difficulty with which the three stories are forced to intertwine. This requires bringing in the Asian tsunami of Christmas 2004 and the tube bombings in London in 2005, and that is not a good sign. The whole affair feels forced and unnatural in a way that Eastwood films seldom are.

Which also brings us on the subject of the tsunami. I’ve just got to spoil this plot point. Marie has a near death experience when she falls victim to a tsunami in an Asian holiday resort. Hereafter was released last Thursday in The Netherlands, a day before the disaster in Japan. I saw the film yesterday. It is no-one’s fault, but it is shocking to see a natural disaster, the first images of which are showing on televisions worldwide, now also on the big screen. And to see it so well done. The similarity, the visual accuracy (perfection is a completely inappropriate phrasing) is unsettling. Especialy as the use of CGI is not apparent, apart from the shot of the initial wave. This happens in the first minutes of the film, and the audience does not recuperate.

I may easily forget most about Hereafter in the following years, as it is a quite unremarkable Eastwood film, but these images will haunt me.

The Big 2011 Academy Award (that is: Oscar) Prediction List

Tomorrow night some Hollywood people over in Hollywood are going to spend the evening giving each other little gold statues and thanking their mothers. And let’s face it: for a day or so it is the most important happening on the planet. More important than Lybia even, although I do kinda expect an agonizing joke about Aaron Sorkin (the writer of those zingy dialogues in The Social Network) having scripted Khadaffi’s mid-week sort-of-speech.

Over the last months I have named several actors, actresses, directors and films as potential Oscar winners, but here is the final list. It is not complete, as I have not delved into shorts, documentaries, foreign films, or short foreign animated documentaries, but it does feature all the major and technical categories. This is not a list of who I think should win, but of who I think will win. And why they will.

 

Best Film: The King’s Speech

 Because: of what I’ve written in the first paragraph of my review of the film.

 

Best Director: David Fincher (The Social Network)

Because: The Social Network is not winning best film, and this is how the Academy usually makes up for that.

 

Best Leading Actress: Annette Benning (The Kid Are Allright)

Because: the Academy is giving her an oeuvre award at the expense of Natalie Portman and her superior single performance in Black Swan.

 

Best Actor: Colin Firth (The King’s Speech)

Because: he should have but did not win last year for an even better performance.

 

Best Supporting Actress: Helena Bonham Carter (The King’s Speech)

Because: she’s riding the wave of success of this film. And she truly supports Colin Firth in his performance.

 

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (The Fighter)

Because: Geoffrey Rush was comic relief in The King’s Speech, and Jeremy Renner is awesome, but The Town was a bad movie.

 

Best Original Screenplay: Inception

Because: it is the most orginal of the nominees, and this way the academy will make up to Nolan for not even having a Best Director nomination.

 

Best Adapted Screenplay: The Social Network

Because: of those zingy flashy dialogues by Aaron Sorkin.

 

Best Animated Film: Toy Story 3

Because: everybody was crying their eyes out under the 3D goggles.

 

Best Original Song: ” We Belong Together”, Randy Newman (Toy Story 3)

Because: everybody was crying their eyes out under the 3D goggles.

 

Best Score: Alexandre Desplat (The King’s Speech )

Because: in a very classic way it tells the story without calling attention to itself. Thus being the polar opposite to Hans Zimmer’s bombastic Inception score.

 

Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins (True Grit)

Because: of all the work he has done with the Coens, and because the movie breathes “Western”.

 

Best Costume Design: Alice in Wonderland

Best Make-Up: The Wolfman

Because: no matter how crappy both films are, these awards have nothing to do with a film’s quality. They are craft prizes.

 

Best Visual Effects: Inception

 Because: that revolving hotel corridor was a REAL revolving hotel corridor, no computer graphic.

 

Best Sound Editing: Inception

 Best Sound Mixing: Inception

Because: of the thundering freight train, the way the sound effects mix with the musical score and that sound of Paris folding ontop of itself.

Best Editing: 127 Hours

Because: of the way it mixes regular images with hallucinations and home video recordings.

So, the take: The King’s Speech and Inception both walk away with four Oscars, but those of The King’s Speech have more gravitas, so that film will be the evening’s big winner. The Social Network gets two statues, but nice ones, so they won’t feel like losers. Toy Story 3 picks up two as well, because everyone cried their eyes out under the 3D goggles. Other awards are neatly divided between the other best film nominees: The Fighter, The Kids Are Allright, 127 hours and True Grit get one each, just as The Wolfman and Alice in Wonderland for awards that say nothing about the quality of those films. The big loser will therefore be Black Swan, which should win Best Director, Best Leading Actress and Best Editing, and for me was even the Best Film of the year. But, as with Pi and Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky is just too much of a  radical pessimist for the Golden State.

Hathaway as Catwoman, Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises

A surprising confirmation yesterday from Warner Brothers concerning the notoriously secretive The Dark Knight Rises project, Christopher Nolan’s third and, probably, last Batman film.

Warner Borthers stated in a press release that Tom Hardy, whose involvement in the film was confirmed earlier (he worked with Nolan on Inception as well) will star as the character Bane, a hyper-intelligent and super-muscular drug addict/villain (in the comic books). Meanwhile Anne Hathaway, of former The Princess Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada fame,  will take on the role of Selina Kyle, Bruce Wayne’s troubled love interest. Catwoman is not mentioned in the release, but there seems to be little point in bringing in Seline Kyle if she won’t turn into Catwoman as well.

These choices are surprising. The wise-cracking Hardy was in my opinion a shoe-in for The Riddler, whereas Hathaway has too much of a girl-next-door image to see her strip into a latex cat suit. On the other hand: Nolan’s bad guy choices were contested but ultimately successful previously: Scarecrow and Ra’s Al Ghul were risky baddies for Batman Begins, as they were not as well known as for instance The Joker. Also, the first announcement that Heath Ledger would be The Joker in The Dark Knight was controversial. And we all know how that turned out.

So let’s for now have trust in Nolan’s judgment, and look forward to The Dark Knight Rises, which is due to hit cinema screens (classic and Imax, no 3D thank God) summer 2012. Its cast was already known to star Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne / Batman, Michael Caine as Alfred, Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox and Gary Oldman as Jim Gordon.

2011 – Short Preview:

We kick the year of in the middle of the awards season. The big ones are of course the BAFTAs, the Oscars and the Golden Globes (although this year’s comedy nominations suggest that they’ve lost their minds there). Main contenders (apart from last year’s Inception, Toy Story 3 and A Winter’s Bone): 1) Darren Aronofsky’s ballet film Black Swan. 2) Horror based on a true story in Danny Boyle’s 127 hours. 3) British Royalty, handicaps and Colin Firth in The King’s Speech. 4) Coen Brothers Western remake True Grit. 5) Family drama with awards darling Nicole Kidman Rabbit Hole and 6) The Fighter, a boxing drama starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale.

There will be a trainload of mostly uninteresting comic book movies coming out. Captain America: First Avenger, The Green Lantern, The Green Hornet, Thor, X-Men: First Class are all completely uninteresting and instantaneously forgettable. Well, that’s the guess. The only one I am really looking forward to is Cowboys & Aliens, because it has cowboys. And aliens. And Daniel Craig. Finally I hold my heart for Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn, because the first pictures were, well, awful.

 

 

 

 

The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn

Looking forward at this year’s comedy offerings one must not set one’s hopes too high. We get The Hangover 2 (bwerk)… Johnny English 2 (nooo!) And we get Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and a sweary alien in Paul (mwah) and if anything is to save the year it must be Your Highness, a medieval set comedy piece the trailer of which suggests that it is at least in the same league as Robin Hood: Men in Tights. In romantic comedy we see two films (No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits) about people having sex without having a relationship. Which is about as unfunny as, well, pornography.

Your Highness

BLAMs then. The original Big Loud Action Movies of this year are JJ Abrams super secretive Super 8 and Paul Bettany versus vampires in Priest. Sequel fare there is in Sherlock Holmes 2 (with the amazing Noomi Rapace joing Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law), Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (which is promised to be at least less dorky then its predecessors) and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, in which Jeremy Renner steps up as the pupil of Tom Cruise. Furthermore there are a gazillion films about aliens attacking earth (see also: Paul and Cowboys & Aliens)

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon

Pixar has as yet its most unpromising offering in years, with Cars 2. Disney continues its classic track of the last two years with Winnie the Pooh and other animation hits might be Rango (which looks greatly odd) and Gnomeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare then: The Tempest, directed by Julie Taymor (Titus) will be a real treat, but I am taking the airplane-in-an-emergency-landing-head-between-your-knees position for Anonymous, a Roland EMMERICH! Take on the Bard’s lifetime.

Stuff I need not mention: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part II, Pirates of the Carribean: At Stranger Tides.