Dancer in the Dark

Dollmaker

By Justin Robinson

I wasn't sure what to make of this book initially.  All I had heard was it was about a guy who made some life-sized dolls he had a disturbing relationship with.  Having read it, I can affirm it is definitely a disturbing story about some life-size dolls.  In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and tell you that if you don't have a relatively strong stomach for disturbing concepts and gore, you probably won't make it past the first 10 pages.  Although, if that's the case, I'm not sure why you would come waltzing into the horror aisle looking for some reading.  Your tolerance for disturbing must be THIS high to go on this ride.

It's not all gore though, of course.  The truly disturbing scenes (either in concept or graphic detail) really just exist to punctuate a truly great story about losing oneself to obsession, unrequited love, being different and the dangers of bringing golems to life with perverse Hebrew sex magic.  I'm not sure how to describe my favorite parts of the book without completely spoiling the plot, but I will say I found the dolls enjoyably imaginative, creepy and alien.  And I enjoyed the overall structure and character development of the story.  It starts with an introduction to the protagonist, which will give you the unsettling feeling that it is not likely to work out well for him.  And after the main characters and their flaws are introduced and set in motion you'll be mumbling, "well, that can't be good." as you keep flipping the pages forward, wondering which weak link will be the first to snap.  The finale, when it arrives, is strange, oddly beautiful and terrifying.  There's a peculiar kind of fascination in watching Stephen, the dollmaker, lose bits of himself to The Work out of an unquestioned compulsion to create, even as it spirals out of control all around him.  

Justin, much like Stephen, has carved a body of words for you, splattered it with blood and gore and brought it to life.  Do yourself a favor and dance with it for a while.

Total Recall of the Heart

I have a serious problem, in that I am compelled to watch every terrible translation of a Philip K. Dick story to the big screen.  I am a huge fan of Dick, Philip K., I've read most of his work, and it's always exciting to watch a new director tear a quirky, paranoid story into bland strips of Action! with mass market appeal.  To be fair, some of movies most true to the story have flopped terribly (*cough* Imposter *cough*), an others have turned out pretty decent despite broad liberties taken in translation.  My favorite example of the latter for a long time was Total Recall.  The movie starts roughly similar to the short story, and then flies away madly with Arnold Schwarzenegger bouncing a bloody path through typical 80s SF goons like a inflatable, musclebound clown, culminating an amazingly ridiculous scene where his eyes are bulging oh-so-believably out of his head (oh no, inflatable Arnold is going to pop!), before being saved by a gust of wind from a terraforming machine and a brief departure from the laws of physics.  So, when I saw they were remaking Total Recall, and it was being helmed by Colin Farrell, I just kind of sighed, because of course I was going to watch it.

The setting is, unsurprisingly, completely different from either the first movie or the original story, although that's not a huge problem.  In order to make writing the rest of the script easier, the world of the future has been demolished by some chemicals or something, rendering most of the planet uninhabitable (unless you're wearing army surplus gas masks), except for England and Australia, which have been given futuristic names clearly not worth remembering.    England uses the Australians for cheap labor and resources, and transports goods and people between the two nations using a system called "the Fall", which is a train that runs through the center of the earth between the two nations.  This is an idea that appeals to the nerd in me, but digging a hole down to the earth's core and then up the other side seems like an odd investment of resources in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

The beginning of the story, again, is the only part that remains true to the original Dickian tale.  A guy walks into a memory store (and asks, "do you know why I'm here?"  Wakka, Wakka!), ahem, and asks for a fake memories of a vacation as a spy, which may or may not be what the viewer watches for the rest of the movie.  This is not much of a spoiler, as the central conceit is not really important to how the movie plays out.  It is more of a casual nod to the source material, after which the narrative again flies away madly with Colin Farrell parkouring a relatively bloodless path through the leftover robots from I-robot and some dollar-store stormtroopers like an expressionless, magically animated mannequin discovered shortly before shooting began, culminating in the same generic running, gunning, punching and jumping sequence that we've all seen several times over every summer for the last 15 years (give or take).

The core of the story is Farrell's Douglas Quaid running and gunning from his slim, pretty, brunette wife (Kate Beckinsdale) to his slim, pretty, brunette co-conspirator/lover (Jessica Biel), both of whom I have a hard time telling apart and spend the rest of the movie fighting over him in scenes that confused me greatly.  The action sequences are okay.  There are robots, and cool shark helicopters and hot wheels race tracks for grown ups that go upside down and a bomb throwing contest in a completely impractical elevator maze in the least space efficient hotel in the known universe and the oh-so-subtley foreshadowed zero-g shooting sequence in the Fall elevator as it passes through the earth's core.  It's the same stuff you've been seeing for a while now, but at least the props are fun.  Farrell does a passable job as handsome action actor, but fails to deliver any emotional resonance or even facial expressions that might give the audience a reason to care about the character.  Bryan Cranston was okay as the villain, and I was pleased to see him here, but wish he'd been given more to work with.

Have you ever listened to an album so much, that it becomes hard to focus on the music/words at all, because you've heard it so much your brain wants to classify it as white noise and ignore it?  That's what this movie felt like to watch, from shortly after the beginning, all the way up until Cranston's character pays for the sins of his TV counter-part in the same fiery explosion we've all seen hundreds of times before.  It's the same explosions, same sequences, same CGI and same actors that you've seen jump, hump, fight and pose in a summer movie, remixed slightly for your amusement, excitement or, failing all those things, distraction and mild titillation.  Which, surprisingly, isn't to say I hated it, there were some neat ideas in the props department and world imagining, but this one's really only for the die-hard SF, action and parkour enthusiasts.  It's mostly just a generic mash-up of I-robot, Mass Effect and Tron.  I give it a two sigh rating.  In the end, I think I was just hoping for a lot more Dick, Philip K..

Programming note

You might notice the reviews fluctuate a bit in form and content.  I am experimenting with styles, length and intent in some of them.  I think I am more and more realizing that I'm not much interested in a "quick review so you know whether to buy the story" kind of site, because there are millions of those already littering the internet.  I think I'm more interested in simply writing essays about the stories to pick apart the themes, form and plot and glean what I can from it and  maybe give it an overall thumbs up or thumbs down.  And, as always, to practice my writing.  Although, having said that, I have an idea for a multi-part review/synopsis of one of the career of one of the most influential TV creators of my youth:  Glen Larson, of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers fame (among many others).  So that might happen.

All of which is to say, still sorting some format issues out.  Contents may continue to settle.

Upon a Dark Horse

*as always, the spoilers galore*

I'm not going to lie, Dark Horse kind of wrecked me for a while.  Not so much in the sense that I was left crumpled on the floor weeping, but I was unsettled for about a week after.  If you've ever seen a Solondz movie, you might understand why.  He has a knack for crafting dark, depressing comedies, all set in the same bleak, sitcom-esque suburbia, that tends to leave the viewer chuckling uncomfortably and shifting in their chairs at the antics therein.  I had only seen Happiness before this, and Dark Horse, while nowhere near as uncomfortable as Happiness, is still an awkward, if compelling watch.

The story centers around Abe, a perpetual man-child who lives with his parents, in his childhood bedroom cocooned with Lord of the Rings action figures, Absolute Vodka posters and Doctor Who merchandise.  He drives a ridiculous yellow hummer to his dad's office, where he pretends to work at a job his dad gave him, in a career he seems to have just about zero interest in.  He's over-weight, under-socialized and going nowhere.  In short, he is failing to thrive.  Not that you could tell it from the way he carries himself.  Abe acts as if he is both the most interesting and inspiring person in the room at all times, while simultaneously blaming the people around him, especially his father and his brother, for all the things wrong in his life.

And this is where I started to resonate uncomfortably with the movie.  The most interesting part about Abe in this movie, is he KNOWS all this.  It's just rather than confront the problem, he drowns himself in nostalgia, optimistic teenage pop aimed at young girls, and gets very upset at even the merest hint of a question about what he's doing with his life.  Sadly, I am familiar with this state.  The most interesting and resonant moments for me personally were the scenes where it has become clear in some fashion that he hasn't been on top of some perfectly normal, easy and necessary thing and his immediate reaction is to get huffy about it, blame everyone else, and then stomp out of the room, tears in the corner of his eyes.  I have been that guy, and good god is it uncomfortable to see that portrayed so accurately on a giant screen in front of you.  Fellow man children (recovering and otherwise) beware, this movie may speak to you a little more directly than you would want.

His relationship with Miranda, while extremely awkward and painful to watch in just about every way, is also by far the funniest part of the movie.  His obliviousness to her emphatic and repeated signals of disinterest is entertaining, if creepy.  Honestly, he's basically a stalker, but you'd never be able to explain that to him in a million years.  But it quickly becomes clear that Miranda is just as much a mess as Abe is, which is the only way it's possible to understand her acceptance of his proposal a week later. But compared to Abe's "oblivious and rolling quickly downhill" kind of mess, we get the sense that Miranda might turn out okay once she stops taking so many meds and starts respecting herself a little more.  She also has a lot of the best lines in the movie.   Her reaction to their first kiss.  "Oh, that wasn't as bad as I expected it to be." kind of sums up everything about her feelings for Abe.  She's settling for a guy she's known for 2 weeks, lives with his parents, pays very little attention to her, and somehow manages to make it sound like this is a sensible and beautiful decision for her life.  Amusingly, that's what it turns out to be for her.

What really interesting about this set-up, is that it takes one simple thing to ruin everything, and it takes about 2 minutes:  Abe gets called on his shit.  His father, gently but firmly calls Abe into his office and basically fires him, but with a purpose.  He points out, quite rightly, that Abe has never wanted this job, Abe doesn't like the business, Abe is drifting along, self-soothing his lack of achievement with his childhood, his consumerism and Katy Perry, and his dad just wants to help push him out into the world and help him find a career he might truly find rewarding.  What he doesn't realize is Abe's world is held aloft by a thin, but oft-reinforced illusion:  that Abe is doing great at his job, is an awesome person that girls want to be with, and has a brighter future just around the corner.  And when his dad, in attempted kindness, attempts to point out that Abe is in fact suffering, the whole thing falls apart.  And again, I can relate.  It's extremely difficult to look back at the last ten years of your life and realize you haven't made a lot of life decisions that you're proud of.  The enormity of that wasted potential is too big to look  directly into, and Abe basically flees in blind terror.  And then things get worse.

Not that it isn't fascinating to watch, train wrecks are hard to look away from, but it's more or less a series of vicious punches to the stomach from there.  He basically retreats almost entirely to a fantasy world where his dad's secretary (Marie) is a worldly, sensual Elizabeth Taylor type, helping him become a man, and where he argues with phantom versions of his family.  Which would be sad enough to watch, until you realize it's all a coma dream.  Abe got in a terrible accident the moment he stormed out of his dad's office.  And between that and complications from the hepatitis he picked up from Miranda, he is slowly dying.  It's a little hard to tell what's real and what's fever dream in the last few minutes.  Does he kiss Marie at the end?  Does his skin really turn yellow?  It doesn't matter, because he doesn't make it.  His fiancee' ends up with his brother (happily by all appearance), and it ends on another fantasy scene of Abe and Marie Dancing to some gentle swing music, which turns out to be the kind of thing Marie has been dreaming about all these years.  Ouch.

Those of you who don't identify quite as strongly with Abe, will probably not find this as much of a downer.  It's dark, it's funny and in a lot of ways, doesn't take itself too seriously.  Solondz's world is cartoony and unrealistic in a way that lets the viewer examine really uncomfortable characters without getting dragged down too much by them.  Still, if you're in your mid-thirties, have a bedroom full of action figures and Doctor Who posters, have been stumbling along for years at a job you never really wanted, trapped by your insecurities and increasingly aware that all the little lies you've been telling yourself to prop up your self-esteem are starting to wear thin, this movie may wreck you a little bit.

Which isn't to say Dark Horse is intended to be a morality tale, that's just how it looked through the lens of my own damage.  Regardless, whether you're looking for a lesson on how NOT to be a geek-culture enthusiast, or simply like to watch uncomfortably damaged people make a slow-motion mess of their lives, Dark Horse is worth a watch.

Undead on Arrival Delivers the Gory Goods

I posted this on my Goodreads account on August 15.  My friend Justin Robinson wrote this book and honestly it's amazing.  Cross-posting here.

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I picked up this book last night, started in on the second chapter, and didn't stop turning pages until I was finished, if that tells you anything about how much I liked this book.  It's a classic noir murder mystery set in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, chronicling the tale of Glen Novak attempting to solve his own murder before being devoured by the zombie plague he has been purposely infected with.

I'm not normally into noir or murder mysteries (I enjoy them, but I've never focused on them particularly), but this one was great.  The writing wastes zero time.   It is, in the truest of sense of the phrase, all killer no filler.   The setting is a small coastal town in California that's managed to work out a semi-stable sense of order within it's walls, although one that turns out to be completely illusory.  The tensions in the town are well balanced between the ever-present worry of an undead swarm and the political tension between the town's power players: the wealthy elitists on the hill, the religious tribe in the town, and Novak's smaller contingent of free-thinking, free-loving, free-maiming pragmatists.  And the basic tension that kept me turning the pages, was wondering what was going to destroy Novak first:  his bite, the undead, the bloody political machinations of the town, or the way he kept making bruised, enraged enemies with his fists.

If you're not into bloody depictions of gore and horror, then this may not be the book for you.  Novak isn't really the kind of guy who fucks around, and once his death warrant is signed, less so.  But, if that kind of thing is up your alley, Jesus does this book deliver.  The zombie (or "geeks") mythology is well-designed, the action sequences are frequent and fun, and Glen's desire for bloody revenge eventually snowballs into a blood-soaked, body-stacked finale that left me wanting to smoke a cigarette.  Or to take up smoking 5 years previously so I could close the book, light up, take a long drag and slowly exhale while saying, "Oh yeah, that hit the spot."

If you like zombies, if you like murder mysteries, if you light tight, well-crafted stories that don't waste your time, pick this book up immediately.

Bernie Did a Bad, Bad Thing

*SPOILERS*

Bernie is an interesting entry in the bourgeoning "-ocumentary" genres.  Not a mock-umentary (a fake documentary about fictional events and people), as it's based on a true story.  Not a true documentary even though it contains many interviews with real townspeople.  Not an entirely fictional "loosely based on a true story as heard by a guy who knew the guy who met the guy" treatment either, which we'll call a funk-umentary, because it's like the truth, but funky.   Let's call Bernie a plot-cumentary (half dramatic re-enactment, half documentary), which seems good enough for now.

The story centers around one of the strangest cases in Texas history, that of a respected mortician and community volunteer in a small town (Carthage) who kills the elderly millionaire who employs him as a close companion, and then tries to cover it all up.  As it turns out, there's only a limited amount of time and finite amount of spun lies you can employ to hide the fact that someone who was alive is now dead, no matter how reclusive or disliked she was.  Jack Black is not the actor who would have jumped out at me for this role, but he does a nice job with the part.  Shirley MacLaine is great as the crazy, reclusive millionaire.  Matthew McConaughey is also there.  But what I really liked about this movie was not the performances, but the fascinating intersection of a couple of my favorite topics within the story itself:  How growing up gay in a fundamentalist, conservative culture can fuck you up and how shitty you can end up being to people when you take "being nice" too far.

Which is not to say I consider growing up religious and conservative to be an unmitigated negative.  Bernie is a very generous man.  He's kind to children and old people, goes out of his way to comfort the bereaved at the funerals he assists at, and performs a wide variety of community service activities.  And even after he admittedly kills a woman in cold blood, he uses her money not for himself, but to help out a number of people in Carthage (he builds a playhouse for some needy kids, funds a new wing at the church, helps out the local Little League team, and so on).  Aside from a little impetuous killing, he's a model community member, and people love him.  They love him so much in fact, that the swaggering D.A. charged with his case is so badgered by townsfolk upset at him for prosecuting such a good Christian boy for such a little thing like murder, that he's forced to request Bernie be tried in another county altogether so he can have even a remote chance at a fair trial.  So, how did it go so wrong for such a good man?

It becomes clear early on in the movie, that while Bernie is happy and friendly, it is less in the "all is perfect and well" kind of way, and more in the "I'm as happy as I can be, given my constraints" kind of way.  Obviously, the latter kind of happiness is really the only one that exists for most people, but in Bernie's particular case, his constraint is the fact that he's gay in a community that will not allow him to be openly gay, and he's making the best out of a life that won't allow him to pursue true love they way it allows everyone else to.  They don't come out and say it, of course, but Bernie loves doing the make-up on corpses, lingers a little too long talking to handsome men, never dates women his age, and absolutely adores old women.  He seems to have made his peace with it, and while it is revealed that many of the townspeople suspect he's "one of THOSE people", he's likable enough that they never hassle him about it.  But, speaking from experience, living that deep in the closet in the middle of a community that would consider disowning you (or worse) if you dropped the pretense of straightness probably kept him  quite a ways from being perfectly happy.  I honestly thought Jack Black did a great job of portraying this particular tension in the character very well.

However, as I said, he seems determined to be happy with the situation he's in.  And his religion has taught him to try to be kind, so try he does.  And ultimately, it is this urge to be nice at all costs that really gets him into trouble.  It starts with the best of intentions, of course.  Bernie, who is just this kind of guy, always makes a special effort to comfort grieving widows during and after the funeral of their husbands, usually stopping by their house within the week to drop by some flowers or an assortment of soothing cheeses. After initially being rebuffed by the gruff Marjorie Nugent, his persistence pays off, and they strike up a friendship that starts off working well for both of them, and eventually devolves into a co-dependent nightmare that ends up with Bernie murdering Marjorie in a fit of frustration.  All because of Bernie's unhealthy obsession with "being nice."

Being nice is a great thing, up until a point.  And that point is moment a person starts feeling abused, but refuses to say anything because they don't want to upset the other person.  Marjorie turns out to be a very unhappy person.  Her joy at making a new friend in Bernie eventually wears off and she becomes abusive, controlling and co-dependent.  She takes him for herself and begins to slowly cut him off from the rest of his life.  Bernie is not dumb, he can see what's happening to him, but he wants to be nice.  Most people inclined to be nice are inclined to overlook momentary crossness or rude words when someone is having a bad day, and that's okay, that's the grease that makes society work.  But when Bernie mostly allows Marjorie to abuse him unrepentantly on a persistent basis without calling her on it, it is not nice.  He doesn't like it, it makes him not want to see her and when he doesn't call her on it, and instead just grins through it, he is lying, which isn't nice.  And even on the few occasions when he summons the courage to call her on something, she just snarls back an indication that she has no interest in changing.

Which is where being nice ultimately fails him.  At this point, he should just leave the relationship until she can promise not to be such a pill.  But he swallows his self-respect and growing resentments and tries to make it work, because he wants to be nice.  But as much as Bernie wants to be like Jesus, NOBODY is as long-suffering as Jesus (even Jesus as it turned out that day in the temple), and people can only bottle so much frustration before it explodes in unintended and occasionally horrific ways, which, as I think we can all agree, is not nice.  This was a lesson I thought we had all learned from the "serenity now!" episode of Seinfeld, but perhaps TV sitcoms are not a high priority in rural Texas.  So, because Bernie has been taught in traditional conservative manner to be nice to others, but was never taught to be nice to himself and not let people abuse him unnecessarily, Bernie impulsively shoots Marjorie in the back four times once he simply can't contain his frustration anymore.

As a quick aside, his immediate reaction to her death is really interesting.  Bernie is an extrovert, and feels things quickly, ostentatiously and probably deeply (he said, with an introvert's bias).  After realizing the enormity of what he's done, Bernie rushes over and picks Marjorie up, begging Jesus to forgive him, and sobs deeply.  And after 30 seconds, catches the freezer out of the corner of his eye, stops sobbing, and immediately starts planning the cover-up.  Personally, I think this is might also be attributable to his personal investment in niceness.  Nobody wants to be caught for murder of course, but Bernie does not want to be caught in not being nice.  So he stuffs his best friend under some cold peas, and stalls for months in order to avoid his moment of accountability.  He's a nice guy though, he fully plans on giving her a proper funeral somehow once he can figure out how to cover up her murder, and has finished doling out her money to deserving charities.

Eventually, of course, he IS caught and confesses fully.  And is viewed as such a nice guy, that even after fully confessing to the murder, most people can't believe he did it.  How could he?  He's such a nice boy.  And this is where his niceness bites him in the ass one more time.  He's so well-liked, that his trial gets moved to a neighboring county to ensure a fair trial, where he is convicted on first-degree murder charges by a completely unsympathetic jury (for what is likely a 2nd degree murder case), and sentenced to life in prison.  Where he teaches cooking classes for inmates, works in the library, and tried to be as happy as he can, given the situation he's in.

Bernie may not thrill everybody.  I think viewers who don't have much a history with either fundamentalism, conservatism or Texas may not find much of a hook in the story.  And while the acting, story and interviews are well handled, they don't exactly sizzle.  Still, as a whole, I find it to be an educational and insightful true-life morality tale about how repression does no one any good, and how you really can take anything too far, even being nice.  Now, if you'll excuse me, for my own peace of mind, I need to go give a few people a piece of my mind.

The Dark Knight Obtains Neutral Buoyancy

(As always, here there be spoilers)

This summer's blockbuster season has more or less constantly contradicted my expectations.  I honestly was not expecting the Avengers to be as good as it was, and I thought Prometheus and Dark Shadows would be far better than they were.  Which brings me to Christopher Nolan's grand finale to his Batman trilogy, the Dark Knight Rises, which I expected to be really good, based on Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, although I admit the trailer gave me pause.  In fact, based on this summer, I'm prepared to call film trailers filthy liars.  They have at every opportunity this summer delivered the exact opposite of what they promised.  This scandal will rock the industry I am sure.

I am a fan of of the goddamn Batman.  I gird my groin proudly with his symbol.  But after finishing this third movie, I'm no longer convinced I'm a fan of Christopher Nolan's or Christian Bale's Batman.  I don't think the interpretation is terrible, mind you.  I'm not calling it bad, but this third movie landed with a bit of a thud for me, which I blame, as usual, on some questionable writing decisions, an increasing tiredness on my part for gritty reboots and possibly unreported head trauma to Christopher Nolan that caused him to forget half of what he taught us about Batman and Gotham City in the first two movies.  Well, I'll even go further and claim I'm not sure he really understands the character, or at least forgot the basic qualities of Bruce Wayne, most likely due to the afore-mentioned head injury.

Batman, Bruce Wayne, is, at his core, a story about a guy who loses his parents in tragedy, and uses the loss of his loved ones to drive his obsessive fight against crime, so that no one else in Gotham City will have to go through what he went through.  It's crazy, but noble.  So, at the beginning of the Dark Knight Rises, it was a bit perplexing to note that Bruce's reaction to the death of Rachel Dawes was to retreat to his mansion for seven years in a dark depression.  Which seems like an odd reaction for a character whose response to loss is typically to fight crime MORE obsessively.  Additionally, from the tone at the end of the Dark Knight, the implication seemed to be that Bruce was going to keep fighting crime, whether the police were on his side or not.  You know, that's what made him a dark knight.  We also learn that during Batman's self-imposed exile, Jim Gordon and the GCPD rid the streets of crime, sans Batman's help which doesn't seem to validate many of his earlier efforts.  So this is why I was kind of nervous from the very start of the movie.  The idea seemed to be that Batman was neither all that driven, nor all that crucial to Gotham's well-being.  Okay then.

The plot, from there, takes a while to build up steam and a lot of it works really well.   The story is a pretty stable mashup of the Dark Knight Returns, No Man's Land and Knightfall story lines from the comics.  The Dark Knight Returns elements, as mentioned, did not feel right to me (in the comics he retires and Gotham suffers for it, not thrives), but the other stories work pretty well together, if not extraordinarily so.  Bane and his "Shakespeare in a can" voice were pretty entertaining, and while the "gotham must be cleansed" plot from the league of shadows was a pure re-hash of the first movie, it was at least consistent.  I enjoyed Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle as well, even if I think her character was underused.  Basically, the first half of the movie, chronicling a dis-spirited and struggling Batman's attempt to figure out what Bane's up to and stop him, only to have his back broken for the trouble, is pretty watchable, if not perfect (the stock exchange heist goes from daylight to dark in about 20 seconds, and a tumble off of a motorcycle at high speed is comically slow).  It's the second half where the plot starts to unwind a bit.

Don't get me wrong, it's still very watchable.  But if you're the kind of person who struggles to enjoy a movie once the plot starts becoming incoherent, you may find find the second half more difficult.  First, the pit.  Oh god, the pit.  Bane, in an attempt to torment Bruce, sends him to the pit where Bane himself was forged in absolute darkness, and in savage brawls with the other inmates.  Which is why it's fairly funny in retrospect to realize that all of Bruce's scenes there are filmed in a beautiful natural light, and he is not only repaired by the staff physician, but receives much support, encouragement and assistance from the other inmates in his attempt to  leave.  He does this by attempting to climb out of the pit up the stone wall, and after he and his freshly healed back survive two 50-ft falls, broken only by the rope around his mid-section (it's a stretch), he manages to learn the vital life lesson he needs to defeat Bane and leave the pit.  As it turns out, there are no guards at the top, and a convenient rope to lower down to everyone else, so really, any passing shepherd could have saved them all at any time.  Everything about the pit is stupid.

Bane's master plan could also have been tighter.  Yes, it's fine that he wants to destroy Gotham for it's sins, I like that in a supervillain.  What I don't get is why he doesn't just set the bomb off, instead of putting gotham through a 5-month morality play about class warfare, and makes locating the bomb a fairly solvable puzzle.  Nor do I understand why he and Talia are prepared to die along with everyone else, when suicide was not the modus operandi of Ras Algul's league of shadows.  Was there no grander plan than blowing up Gotham?  How would that strike fear into the rest of the world if all the perpetrators were dead afterwards?  Furthermore, why keep the cops alive?  He's going to kill them eventually anyway, where does keeping the only army capable of challenging him alive get him?

Which brings me to the second way Nolan contradicts himself between this movie and the Dark Knight.  At the end of the Dark Knight we learn that Gotham has a better soul than the villains give them credit for.  Given the opportunity to blow each other up to save themselves, even the prisoners do the right thing.  Gotham won't tear itself apart at the whim of a madman (absent chemically induced fear mania). But when Bane shows up and terrorizes them, they're suddenly okay with it?  Are Gothamites just suckers for a good Sean-Connery-eating-beans-out-of-a-can impression?

The finale itself, I had mixed feelings about.  The cops charging Bane's army was kind of silly.  It's as if they all forgot they had guns.  The revelation that Talia had been pulling all the strings was fun, if predictable.  Although it effectively muted any satisfaction at Bane's defeat.  Batman's morality gets a little confused as well, in that he refuses to kill Bane, but doesn't disown Selina for doing it for him, and his firing on Talia's truck from the Bat effectively kill her and her driver, which he doesn't seem to show remorse about.  Talia's death rattle, by the way, was borderline comical.  And beyond that, I liked at least that he got to go out the hero, and retire to lead a quiet Bruce Wayne-ish life with Selina.

So yes, it's nice that Batman gets to live out the rest of his days in peace, but I don't really like who Batman turns out to be in Nolan's universe.  I mean, yes, the gadgets, the vehicles and the villains were pretty fun, but Batman himself is kind of weak.  I mean, Bale plays a pretty good, if not super compelling, moody billionaire, but when he's got the mask on and his cheeks are all poofed out and he's spitting angrily at whomever he's holding by the collar, it's kind of comical.  Beyond, that, this grand arc where billionaire loses parents, becomes obsessed with crime fighting for a few years . . . until he quits in self-pity before finally rousing himself for one last battle, where he fakes his death and lives a life of idle luxury happily ever after just seems less epic than it could be.

Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the first two movies a great deal, but I thought they were building to something, you know?  Building towards some grand final, theme about this madman, the Batman.  And in the end that theme is: Batmanning is hard for billionaire playboys who can't really sustain the effort for more than a few years.  Which is realistic to be sure.  But I think too much realism destroys a comic book story and sad to say, I think this is exactly what happened with the Dark Knight Rises.

Prometheus Unwound

  The return of a king can be a powerful moment.  Sometimes the people we entrust with our beloved ideas, properties and occasionally children make such a mess of things, that we start to long for the good old days and a return to order, and who better to accomplish that than the king who ruled when times were good?  Fans of the Alien franchise had been looking forward to Prometheus for just that reason.  Every Alien movie after the first sequel has been disappointing on a downward spiral.  So fans were understandably excited when Ridley Scott announced he was returning to the franchise he started way back in 1979.  Hail to the king!

Why we expected him to return wreathed in glory, smiling confidently, in golden, shiny armor can probably be attributed to the eternal baseless optimism of industry producers and the viewing public, bolstered by an amazing trailer.  So after the disastrous “return to genre” performances of recent memory (Spielberg, Lucas, Romero, Carpenter, Kubrick, etc.), watching yet another king ride back into view filthy, naked, and ranting incoherently about gods, monsters and aliens, should not have been a surprise, but still . . . I was surprised at how big the gap in quality between Alien and Prometheus was.  How big a gap you say?  I am glad you asked.

It’s hard to know where to start, so let’s start with the shortest and easiest question to answer:  what did the movie do right?  The cinematography is stunning, as you might expect from Ridley Scott. The technology effects are top-notch, and the imagined world impressive.  The acting will not shake up the Oscars this year, but this was almost entirely due to circumstances beyond the control of the actors.  Fassbender, Theron, Rapace and Elba all did great with what they were given.   Fassbender's acting in particular was fun, and while his character generated a lot of interesting questions, they get lost in the general mish-mash of poor plot and character decisions involving the rest of the cast.  I didn't notice the music at the time, but several friends remarked that it didn't seem to suit the movie.  On the premise that it at least did not get in my way, I'm going to say the soundtrack was acceptable.  Sadly, there is very little beyond that that I don’t find increasingly objectionable the more I think about it.

Prometheus, for all the hype, investment money and big names associated with the project, goes wrong early on a few fundamental levels related to telling any kind of story:  characters, plot, theme.   It is easiest to just work through them one by one.