The Dark Knight Rises **

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Anne Hathaway, Marion Cotillard
Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Morgan Freeman

Contrary to popular belief, Christopher Nolan might very well be the least imaginative working director trying to pass himself off as an auteur. Movie after movie he proves that his need for self-indulgence often interferes with his delivery; his two last movies being grandiose exercises in incoherence. With The Dark Knight Rises he unintentionally forces us to ponder on a basic aesthetic conundrum: should all ideas be put on some sort of artistic medium?
The question arises from Nolan's absolutely reactionary statements, given that The Dark Knight Rises practically borders on fascism. The director suggests that any sort of social uprising comes in detriment to the development of capitalism and that only the rich can save the day. If this was 18th century France, Nolan would be on his way to the guillotine.
Perhaps the notion that art should be limited to "good ideas" is fascist in itself, but it's not meant as censure, instead it intends to explore what is it precisely that constitutes art. Nolan's fascism isn't bad from a purely aesthetic level, but it's offensive as "art".
Leni Riefenstahl's ideas and support of the Nazi party might have marked her as an "evil" figure but no one watching "Olympia" or "Triumph of the Will" can say that they fail as art. Riefenstahl challenged the format of the documentary and despite her supremacist thoughts, she encompassed the beauty of the human body in a way that hadn't been achieved since the Renaissance.
Then we come to The Dark Knight Rises and not only are Nolan's ideas disturbing, but his execution is absolutely clunky. Every cut and dialogue aim to contribute to an operatic feeling, but the only crescendo in the film is suggested by Nolan's tasteless use of aural and visual tricks. Why does the villain Bane (Hardy) need to sound like a Darth Vader parody? Why does the tribal chanting that obnoxiously permeates the film have to be related to the Middle East? Why is such great effort made to remind us about the goodness and inherent kindness of billionaires? How is this ever really about Gotham City and not about Bruce Wayne (Bale) trying to save his status as a symbol of power (penniless or not)? What exactly does Nolan have against women (especially those named Marion Cotillard)?
The Dark Knight Rises fails as spectacle, as entertainment and other than for Anne Hathaway's scene stealing turn as Catwoman (she seems to be acting in a vastly superior film) the only thing rising in this installment are its director's delusions. 

Instant Semi.

Y'all know I'm neither a Nolan or Batman fan but this is just ZOMG!

You Won't Forget About Pearce.

Today I had an epiphany.

While trying to find a truly striking screenshot of Memento, I realized I might have discovered the reason why I'm not a fan of Christopher Nolan...

*drum roll*

The man doesn't make memorable images.

*awaits booing*

But let me explain myself...Nolan is usually compared to Stanley Kubrick in terms of formalism and technical mastery, but truly, where Kubrick was a master at creating indelible images (almost all of his films have at least one truly iconic shot) Nolan has never achieved this.

Before the bashing begins, give this a thought.

What's really memorable about his films? In The Dark Knight it was Heath Ledger's larger-than-life performance, Inception was all about the cool factor and Memento, well, Memento was all about the mind fucks.

One can say that Nolan is much more of a cerebral filmmaker; his movies work because of the ideas behind them, not particularly because he knows how to execute said ideas in an aesthetically pleasing way. And by this I don't mean I'm expecting him to deliver three-strip Technicolor features or hire Wong Kar-wai as a visual consultant, because that's not really his thing. It's just that he's so worried about making a smart impression on people that he truly forgets that movies can be beautiful and smart.

He doesn't have to be the ugly chick who quotes Nietzsche and never puts out to preserve her dignity, he can be the big boobed blonde that surprises you because of her intellect.

Sure, his movie might've won an Oscar for cinematography this year, but that was actually a breakthrough for AMPAS. Usually they reward the prettiest movie; this year they remembered that cinematography is also about camera movement and technical mastery. Nolan's movies sure have that, but they rush so fast that their stream of consciousness like shots, make it tough, if not impossible to be haunted by any of them.

P.S: my favorite shot of Memento is this one...

...because if I was as hot as Guy Pearce I'd also take pictures of myself and be all like "who me?" whenever I found myself looking at them and sighing about how pretty I was.

This post is part of Nat's unforgettable "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" series.

Inception **

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy
Ellen Page, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy
Tom Berenger, Pete Postlethwaite, Marion Cotillard, Michael Caine

Inception gets wrong everything that film noir got right. Perhaps, because in its attempt to create something groundbreaking and original, while obviously referential, it forgot that complexity and depth are often found within simplicity.
Nolan alludes to some of his idols like Stanley Kubrick and Michael Mann to come up with an ambitious facade that reveals deep inside there wasn't much to be said after all.
To put it in a blunt analogy, the movie is the equivalent of receiving a beautifully wrapped package for your birthday only to realize it contains socks.
Inception takes place in a future where corporate espionage has moved to the next level. Instead of sending spies into the companies; ideas and thoughts are stolen directly from the minds of its creators.
Using a machine and a series of sedatives, these dream thieves are able to navigate the minds of people and access hidden information. They create entire dreams, populate them with characters and other tricks to invade the person's subconscious.
But these dreams are made out of different levels and contain all kinds of rules that make this much harder than one would think.
This process is called "extraction" and Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is the go-to-man for these kind of jobs. Of course he has a dark past that led him to this line of work; in his case it's his tempestuous relationship with his wife Mal (Cotillard) and the fact that he's a fugitive who's been trying to make it back home for a while.
One day Dom receives a unique request from powerful businessman Saito (Watanabe), he doesn't need information, he needs "inception", to implant an idea inside his main competitor's (Murphy) mind.
Inception is some sort of urban myth, few people think it can be done, and Cobb reluctantly takes on the job after Saito promises he will clear his charges and make sure he gets back home safe.
To proceed with the heist, Cobb recruits Arthur (Levitt), his main partner and logistics man, Eames (Hardy) a clever impersonator capable of taking on anyone's personality in dreams, Yusuf (Rao), an experienced chemist who provides the sedatives and Ariadne (Page) an architect meant to design the various levels of the dreams.
The plot then moves like your regular heist movie and just like one, pulls cards out of its sleeves to make every twist and turn feel like the ultimate thrill. The thing about Inception is that it's so in love with its own grandiosity that it forgets to have any fun.
By providing certain rules that regulate the dream world (and are sure to become part of geek boy lexicon like the dialogue in Fight Club) the screenplay tries to conceal the fact that Nolan isn't capable of handling different levels of existence in the way Robert Altman did (without the fantastic sci-fi aid mind you).
One of the major elements about the dream world is that as the characters go down one level, time changes. This gives Nolan the opportunity to push slow motion to the limit and come up with some nice looking photographic tricks that make less obvious the fact that Nolan's eyes were bigger than his creative stomach. He tries to inject complexity into pausing action.
Because honestly nothing really happens during these time swifts which usually require the characters to fall asleep in order to work.
The whole movie actually functions on a paradoxical premise: we get the rules but they don't make much sense.
Sure, one could say that sci-fi allows its creators to bend reality and push the imagination but what are we supposed to think about a movie in which the characters are so faithful to the regulations of the world they inhabit, when the screenplay is constantly telling us to take a "leap of faith". Is this leap meant to make us ignore the plot holes in Nolan's writing?
How then, one might wonder, is it possible for the characters to keep secret from each other when invading someone else's mind?
If they are all in one person's subconscious and get to travel together from mind to mind, wouldn't it make sense that they all knew what the other was thinking? To go into these kinds of questions would make the movie fall like a house made out of playing cards and perhaps it's better to give Nolan the benefit of the doubt.
Yet even if it wasn't for the lackluster writing, Inception is doomed by its exhaustive and exhausting attempt to seem clever.
Nolan draws from film noir to come up with the whole plot. We have the "last job", the "man without a past", the femme fatale and other basic elements that made up the film style.
However noir was effective because it took place in a universe where dreams didn't exist, where people became archetypes trying to rediscover humanity.
In films like The Maltese Falcon ("the stuff which dreams are made of") and Out of the Past we saw human decay being explored in such a unique way that we saw the stories take place in locations that seemed real but we knew were representations of larger themes.
These movies about detectives, prostitutes and disloyal crooks were actually studies of the pathologies found in society and explorations of the implications popular culture was beginning to have on the collective psyche.
Yet talking about them, it's hard at first to see them for more than what they are. Inception on the other side, takes these stories into the location they were actually taking place in (the human mind) and by overexplaining them ironically robs them of their entire oneiric qualities.
Film noir is dream-like, Inception somehow is not.
Added to this, we have to wonder about the reality suggested in the world where Inception takes place. Nolan never bothers in suggesting there are any sort of ethical implications to what the dream thieves are doing.
We have to wonder if more people in this world are aware that this exists. Without this it's almost impossible for this technique to feel menacing. How can someone fear what they can't fathom possible?
The movie lacks a feeling of threat that goes beyond what the characters are going through. As personal as the subconscious they're invading might be, there is still a body that owns it and is presumably regulated by things like the law and societal rules.
Why then does the movie forgo all this and tries to trick us by making it seem as if it's only these characters who exist in the world (even taking into account some plot twists, it would still be rather limited to stick to such a facile theory).
It would be easy to dispute almost any element about the film's structure but the one thing nobody can deny is the lack of coherence in the dichotomy between mind and emotion.
We are constantly reminded by the characters that as logical as dreams may seem, they are ruled and commanded by feelings.
It's even one of the main points in planning the heist.
When it comes to executing this though, the movie falls apart disastrously even if a lot of the characters are constantly talking about emotions.
"What do you feel?" asks Mal, in what should've been the movie's emotional center. Instead of making the audience shed a tear, this scene just proves how disconnected the movie is from its own speech.
As if Nolan too chose to forget a truth he once knew...or maybe just lacks the directorial skills to aim at both mind and heart.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, in fact Kubrick made a career out of the purely cerebral, Nolan perhaps should also stick to what he knows best.
Sadly because the movie doesn't have the emotional core it refers to so much, we are denied the opportunity of watching either an entertaining heist flick or a tragic romance.
But not everything about the movie disappoints. The action sequences are interesting although their reminiscence to the Batman flicks and Insomnia make it seem like all these characters dream of are Christopher Nolan movies. It would've been interesting to see him play with these landscapes in a more surrealistic way, perhaps not pushing it all the way into whimsical territory like Hitchcock and Dalí did but at least toying a bit more with all the fuss about how in dreams you can build whatever you want.
Then there's Marion Cotillard who not only gets the film's most interesting "character" but also makes Mal so rich and complex that an eventual plot twist will leave us scratching our heads in awe. Watching her walk with the elegance of Marlene Dietrich while the world, literally, falls apart around her is watching an actress at the height of her powers. There is nothing she can't do.
The same can not be said about the movie, which proves that the more you talk about ideas doesn't mean you are particularly enlightened.

It's a Sealed Deal.

The Directors Guild of America has announced its nominees for the year 2008.
Lo and behold as they are exactly the same nominees everyone expected and that everyone is bored of listening about.

David Fincher, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"
Christopher Nolan, "The Dark Knight"
Ron Howard, "Frost/Nixon"
Gus Van Sant, "Milk"
Danny Boyle, "Slumdog Millionaire"

A respectable list absolutely, but really were these the only five movies worthy of awards last year?
I can not only think of at least ten better directed movies than "Frost/Nixon", but the fact that this movie is getting the "everyone nominates but has no chance of winning" slot makes me bored about how people have been voting like cattle.
Before the Oscar nominations come out (just 14 days left...) I'd love for these people to see their screeners and actually grow a unique voice.
If this will be our Best Picture, Best Director lineup count me in for bored as hell, I'll just tune in on February 22nd to watch Hugh Jackman sing and Penélope Cruz's speech.

The Dark Knight ***1/2

Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast:
Christian Bale,
Heath Ledger,
Aaron Eckhart
Maggie Gyllenhaal,
Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman

The essence of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is pretty much contained in an exchange of dialogue between two random characters.
Two men sit in a bar while everyone else in the city is consumed by fear. One of them asks “shouldn’t you be out there doing something?”, the other remains seated and replies “today’s my day off”.
The new entry in the Batman saga, might as well have been called “On the Gotham Waterfront” because like, and maybe not as deep since, the 1954 film it explores what makes a singular person stand up against a decaying world of corruption.
As a group of mobsters flood Gotham City with crime, three men unite to bring an end to the mob; Lieutenant James Gordon (Oldman) who seems to be the only incorruptible police member, new District Attorney Howard Dent (Eckhart) who has become a guiding light of hope in the arena of politics and billionaire Bruce Wayne (Bale) as the Batman, the masked vigilante who Gotham fears, hates and loves.
After a couple of big hits against organized crime, the mafia bosses receive a business proposition from a bizarre psychopath who calls himself the Joker (Ledger): for half their money, he will kill Batman for them.
Once they understand the scope of the Joker’s evil, they, ironically, take him seriously, accept his plan and stand back as the villain unleashes complete hell on the city.
The finale of “Batman Begins” was a thing of rare beauty; as a single card announced the arrival of a villain for the next chapter and the film somehow assumed that the audience would be back for more.
Turns out that this overpowering mix of excitement and arrogance was built upon steady grounds, because “The Dark Knight” not only fulfills the promise set by its predecessor, it raises the bar to a completely different level which films, not merely the ones inspired by comic books, rarely touch.
Nolan’s hyper realistic vision, gets under your skin and creates constant threat and fear, making this the most political film released so far this year as it deals with terrorism, impending cataclysms and seeping corruption without moralizing and going to absolutely dark places without becoming hopeless.
The Joker is Nolan’s biggest ally in this, because as a self professed lover of chaos he is as unpredictable and destructive as a force of nature.
Ledger’s performance is one of pure maniacal evil; wearing makeup he seems to have extracted from the ashes and blood of the dead, he moves like a sneaky creature. His scars are terrifying because you never learn where they come from (he delivers a different backstory to whoever he’s interested in destroying next) and whenever he’s not onscreen you fear what he will do next.
The whole film serves itself from this impending sense of doom, but Nolan is a master at keeping this feeling on various levels.
His idea of chaos doesn’t come only as obvious explosions and evident acts of terrorism (dealt with in thrilling and elaborated action sequences, where Wally Pfister’s cinematography shines and which the movie has plenty of), but the worst kind which grows inside all of his characters making them question the nature of good and evil.
Eckhart’s Dent begins as an idealistic politician, aided by his looks (which make him feel like Gary Cooper in a Capra film) and his defiant spirit, the actor brings a sense of optimistic sadness to Harvey, with Eckhart you feel the struggles he had to face to get where he’s at.
Those familiar with the Batman story (and sometimes the script becomes a bit predictable based on this need to satisfy its comic book roots) know that Dent will turn out for the worst and those that don’t, still will feel that he is too good to be true and will expect him to fulfill their need to be right and show his dark side.
Proving that Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s screenplay has a point when it tackles people’s shaky view of moral grounds.
When you take into consideration that Dent and Wayne both are in love with the same woman (played by Gyllenhaal, more luminous than ever) and that fate plays a big deal in their lives, you realize that Dent is the real tragic figure of the story. He is the one the gods choose to play with.
In an ensemble that works wonders, Freeman as Lucius Fox and Caine as faithful butler Alfred, go beyond bringing the joy of their mere presences and deliver their lines with enough class to avoid being tagged as comedic relief.
Oldman’s Gordon anchors the film with a performance that draws from serenity and subtlety. His quiet manner and his strong belief in the good in others, especially in the slowly rotting system he’s part of, give the story its strongest axis of hope.
And Bale, who like Batman suffers from a syndrome of being given for granted, turns in the film’s most powerful performance as someone who has to take on all the troubles times two.
For his Bruce Wayne a line must be set between the careless playboy image and the part of him that comes closer to his alter ego and leads him to put his secret identity in jeopardy.
For his Batman a limit must be established between how strong is his will to fight injustice, without crossing to the side of lawlessness.
This is no ordinary superhero and Bale vanishes so much into both of them that even his character begins to feel shakable.
While we wonder what makes people choose between good and evil, Bale pushes us further and at moments makes us believe that Wayne is so selfish that as Batman he uses Gotham (designed by Nathan Crowley as a concrete labyrinth that rivals the mind in terms of dark alleys) as his personal playground or as his unlimited therapy session where he can battle his demons at the sake of others.
The Joker feeds from this sense of duality inside everyone and in the film’s greatest scene poses a dilemma of Melvillean proportions between the passengers of two ferries.
During these moments you can see “the whole world contained in one place” as people fighting for survival build democracy for contingencies, wonder about the paths they’ve taken in their lives and even dare to think they can decide who lives and who doesn’t.
Interestingly enough, here the audience also makes a choice and based on this personal decision the film will have a different outcome for anyone who watches it.
While for some it will instill the need to find the light shining in the darkest places, for others who have laughed at the Joker’s horrifying deeds it will just be a reassurance of apocalypse.
What remains true is that in “The Dark Knight”s sadomasochist view of the world the brave ones are those who wonder if we’ve become immune to other people’s pain; with the potential for the heroic lying in the path this leads them to.