“At first, I didn’t believe it, that this woman who looked as fertile as the Tennessee Valley could not bear children.


But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

Batman: The Dark Knight (2008)

In my humble opinion (and I’m no comic-book scholar), the Joker might be the single greatest villain in the paneled world. I love Jack Nicholson’s take on the character, but sorry, it’s not the least bit frightening. Sure, he puts strychnine into make-up, shampoo, and cologne, and drops lethal nerve gas onto Gotham city, but the man himself? He’s little more than an overweight Pan-Caked doofus. He’s entertaining to watch, but the character was served very poorly. The Joker must create the same feeling that, say, Anthony Hopkins did, in The Silence of the Lambs: he’s all feral, ungovernable teeth and nails, and the pane of glass blocking him off from your fingers and toes is the most precious thing in the world to you when you’re standing before him. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I saw the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his sober reimagining of the Batman frachise, Batman Begins (2005), “The only thing we found in his pockets were knives and lint.” Yes!! The Joker, himself, is a flailing knife, and a prodigiously sharpened one, waving back and forth in the air, aiming for no one in particular, but saving no one a slice through the jugular.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) didn’t take the comic book character seriously (whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know) and his two films were silly, tongue-in-cheek affairs much closer to resembling the campy 1966 television series starring Adam West

...than to the hard-edged comics by Frank Miller (1986) (left) or Alan Moore (1988) (right).



Personally I found the Adam West television show to be insufferable. I think Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is irredeemably silly and his Batman (1989) is tolerable because I enjoy watching Nicholson, even though he’s only scary very briefly and the rest of the time prances like a peacock and looks like one of those clowns who show up to children’s birthday parties to fashion balloon animals.

As for Christopher Nolan’s offering of the character, much has been said about Heath Ledger’s Joker, but not all the credit must go to him: 35% of the success must go to the make-up and wardrobe department, for avoiding Nicholson’s flamboyant, camp getup and going with dark purple murderer chic.

The other masterstroke is smudging Ledger’s face paint so that it streaks, splotches, and runs, a deliberate mess which brilliantly radiates the warped sloppy dissonance reverberating in the Joker’s brain cavity.

And of course, there is Ledger himself, who displays a gift for a giggling array of facial tics and ghoulish idiosyncrasies that turn him into a walking magnet. When Ledger enters a room, the air bristles as if receiving an animal that escaped from the zoo; he skips around hostages like a demented jackal, as wild and capricious as a starving wolf. It’s the Joker as plausible mass murderer, which makes him arrestingly, urgently scary.

Even the harshest critics of this film will be hard-pressed to find a boring breath or gesture from Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, a portrayal that makes Jack Nicholson’s look as silly and unthreatening as a Cirque du Soleil mime on a bender.

However, like Batman Begins, the story is often tediously by the numbers, and Nolan persists in his underwhelming artistry, being merely functional as a director rather than the virtuoso showstopper that jubilant fans seem to be confusing with the performance of an actor that deserved a much greater film to surround it. The film is 2 hours and 35 minutes, and it feels like it. It took about an hour and a half for me to actually start to care. Part of this comes from the fact that the Joker only makes two or three all too brief appearances during the First Act, one of which has him threatening a powerful gangster with a forcible widening of the mouth via knife blade. The Joker tells a macabre little story to the man about his abusive upbringing all the while holding the knife to the corner of the man’s mouth. The anticipation builds for a bizarre face mutilation, a demonstration of the mysterious Joker’s sadistic glee, and, and, there’s a loud noise of some sort, and the man falls dead. What? Did he stab him? Did he slice his throat? Did one of the Joker’s thugs shoot the man dead? Nolan fumbles this moment so badly that it practically invalidates the entire scene. There are many inept choices made by the director throughout the film. He shoots one or two action scenes rather competently, but others are just close-ups of blurs. You’d think by now Nolan would have learned to be liberal with the establishing shots and concerned with delivering coherent fight sequences. He has improved since Batman Begins, though, as seen during a spectacular long-distance shot of an 18-wheeler exploding from the base and catapulting vertically through the air. The action scenes are moderately thrilling when they are done well, two especially. The first is an awesome chase of a police van through a tunnel by a truck housing the Joker’s henchmen. The awesomeness comes in when the speeding truck pulls up alongside the van, and a side compartment of the truck opens to reveal the Joker himself, who proceeds to fire at the van with a fully automatic machine pistol, a shotgun, and finally, a bazooka.

He does most of this while giggling.

The second occurs just after the 18-wheeler has landed upside down at the end of a Gotham City street which has been turned into an impromptu war zone by the Joker. He pulls himself out of the 18-wheeler, and walks into cars driving in his direction, firing a submachine gun at them to clear his path. At the opposite end of the street is Batman on his Batpod. The urban mayhem and the street duel are shot very well so as to accentuate the city buildings towering around the Joker and Batman, as if to underline the power these two men have over the city, reminding us that the one who wins the city is the one who doesn’t back down.


A game of chicken commences as Batman speeds his Batpod towards the Joker, who refuses to move, inviting the collision. Of course Batman must swerve out of the way of the madman, and the motorcycle skids and crashes. This is basically the showdown to end all showdowns. As Joker says later, “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”

The reason the film appears to reach such newfound heights is the way the Joker character has unleashed everyone’s inhibitions about what’s safe or not. Hearing negative reviews criticizing the film for being, among other things, “sadistic,” was reassuring. I wanted my Joker served up hideous, uncompromising, as twisted as possible.

Unfortunately, hyperbolic reports of uber-darkness inflated my conception of what was to come. The murder and mayhem Nolan serves up is considerably less transgressive than what I wanted: Joker blows some shit up, cold-bloodedly guns down some henchmen, threatens people with malevolent behavior, nothing unusually envelope-pushing. A major character is killed in an explosion, but my reaction was more akin to, “Didn’t expect that person to die. Huh.” than, “Truly Gotham city, nay, the world seems to now be shrouded in pitiless tragedy! This is R-rated levels of cynicism and brutality!” These cries of sadism are coming from some really soft film reviewers. The most freakish, subversive thing is an instance where Nolan has the Joker dress up in a nurse’s outfit.

The only thing the film does that could be considered really upsetting to anyone older than maybe 12 is to show the Joker videotaping himself with a duct-taped hostage and then cackling madly while we hear cries of distress or pain from the hostage and then the video feed cuts to static.

About the scene with the nurse’s outfit, Nolan did impress with his managing a wide shot of the Joker (in nurse’s outfit) ambling out of a hospital (evacuated to preserve the children’s tears) as it erupts into fireballs behind him. Within the same single take, the Joker turns to his handiwork and I held my breath that Ledger wouldn’t fuck anything up for fear that all those very expensive detonations and freshly exploded building would have been wasted, or that Nolan would have to abandon his desired edit-free shot. Thankfully, Ledger is a consummate pro and the already impressive sequence is made even more impressive by virtue of its being a virtuoso long take.

I’ll probably see it again simply to revel in Ledger’s maniacal performance, a performance which is too entertaining and too iconic to merit anything less than a posthumous Academy Award.



Grade: B+

The Prestige (2006)

If you were to write a screenplay about a pair of rival magicians who both have acts which require them to be in two places at once, what would be the cheapest, least imaginative plot device you could implement to produce this magic trick? The answer reminds me of a sort of amusing exchange from Thank You for Smoking (2005): when a movie producer mentions that he plans on including cigarettes in a new sci-fi space movie, Aaron Eckhart’s Tobacco lobbyist asks, “But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?” to which the movie producer replies, “Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue: ‘Thank God we invented the... you know, whatever device.’”

Is it fitting or ironic that a movie about magicians duplicates the feeling of seeing a confounding magic trick, only to learn the secret, and find out that it’s incredibly disappointing? Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden performs an impossible stunt, where he stands on a wide stage with a pair of door frames on opposite ends, bounces a rubber ball across the stage, enters the door on the left, and exits from the door on the right, just in time to catch the bouncing ball. Hugh Jackman’s Robert Angier is in the audience, and when asked what he thought of this trick (dubbed “The Transporting Man” by Borden), utters, “It was the greatest magic trick I have ever seen.” Borden and Angier have a history that manages to be slightly less convoluted than the back-and-forth revenge tactics they exercise on one another involving “The Transporting Man” magic trick. The simpler revenge tactics involving a loaded pistol and the smashing of a birdcage, however, are one of the sparse points of interest to be found in the film before the nonsense with the Tesla machine collapses it into tedium. The Tesla machine is the lazily contrived plot device that is laid as the cornerstone upon which the entire plot’s architecture wobbly sits.

This dull and convenient contrivance could be overlooked if the architecture benefiting from it was at all compelling. The first time I saw the film, I was distracted by the deliberately tangled complications of the plot, but once the secret is revealed, all that is left for a second viewing is the routine. Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan know how to invent a gimmick strange enough to invite me on a search for answers, but Nolan has not figured out a way to make the journey rewarding in and of itself. Nolan’s direction is functional at best and insipid at worst. The only particularly rewarding aspect of watching The Prestige a second time is admiring the lighting, which is rich and elegant.

What is the most preposterously asinine story element is the gratuitous exchanging of identities between Fallon and Alfred. He says, “Fallon was both of us. We would switch,” needlessly jeopardizing and finally destroying the affections of both his wife and mistress.

As Alfred's mistress (but Robert's first) Scarlett Johansson is immensely watchable, of course...

...and, like Keira Knightley, does not seem out of place in period settings.

Her acting is fine. Michael Caine is quite good, but his character is underused. Christian Bale is enigmatic, but then again, next to Hugh Jackman’s theatrically arched eyebrows and inadvertently farcical overexpressiveness...


...Christian Bale is downright inscrutable.

Hugh Jackman is a gifted comic actor, but when called upon to play a dramatic role, the results are disastrous. I often found myself bursting into laughter when watching his excessively earnest overwrought grieving and raging in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006). He loses a wife tragically in this film too and gets a chance to do the excessively earnest overwrought grieving and raging all over again...

...duplicating the unintended mirth experienced during The Fountain (2006).

That is not to suggest that this sorry and perfunctory deception is in the same league as Aronofsky’s film; it is only to suggest that Hugh Jackman should stick to frivolous things like Broadway musicals and leave the serious histrionics for darker actors.

As for Christopher Nolan, he still hasn’t proved that he’s anything more than a hired gun with a few cards up his sleeve…which, I suppose, would make him ideal for manufacturing a film about a couple of frauds.


Grade: C-

Spartacus (1960)

“The script could have been improved in the course of shooting, but it wasn’t. Kirk [Douglas] was the producer. He and Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter, and Edward Lewis, the executive producer, had everything their way.”
-Stanley Kubrick
Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

I watched Spartacus for one reason and one reason alone: out of obligation to finish viewing every single one of Stanley Kubrick’s 12 available features (his first, Fear and Desire (1953) has never been released on video). I’m happy to say it was more compelling than I had imagined and despite the worrisome quote above, basically a success, though one that feels a little dated. Kirk Douglas is best in the first Act of the film, when he silently anguishes in a subterranean holding cell for slaves being trained to fight as gladiators for Lentalus Batiatus (the great Peter Ustinov), a man who is less nasty in lording over his doomed than Oliver Reed’s gnarled Proximo in Gladiator, but still cheerfully pitiless. There is a powerful and moving moment when Kirk Douglas’s eponymous hero is beaten in a impromptu gladiatorial battle by Draba (Woody Strode), a tall fearsome black slave.


Draba is given the thumbs down by Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) and his female companion, but instead of plunging his trident into Spartacus’s throat, Draba hurls it at Crassus and leaps up to the balcony where the royals spectate, only to be incapacitated by a spear, and then brutally slashed by Crassus, sacrificing his life for human decency. It is a devastating moment of noble heroism that is all the more effective for transpiring without bluntly informing us of how noble it was.

Unlike, say, a crucial scene near the end, when the captured Spartacus talks to his loyal soldier and friend, Antoninus (Tony Curtis) outside the gates of Crassus’s fortress.

Antoninus: “Could we have won, Spartacus? Could we ever have won?”

Spartacus: “Just by fighting them, we won something.”

This exchange and the many others where characters talk incessantly, faces shining while violins play, about F-R-E-E-D-O-M is not too far removed from the platitudes of Braveheart, and if the screenplay of the film had been written by Kubrick (he wrote, or co-wrote all of his other films, including Lolita, for which he went uncredited), such clichéd aphorisms would have been excised. As would the mawkish romance between Spartacus and Varinia (Jean Simmons), who frolic in a meadow in one scene while warm gooey music strums insufferably.

Spartacus: I’m free. And what do I know? I don’t even know how to read.

Varinia: You know things that can’t be taught.

Spartacus: I know nothing. Nothing! And I want to know. I want to. I want to know.

Varinia: Know what?

Spartacus: …I want to know all about you. Every line…every curve. I want to know every part of you. Every beat of your heart.

No doubt Stanley Kubrick was in pain when it came time to shoot this scene. I was in pain watching it. Again, Spartacus was the one film on which Kubrick had no involvement in preplanning, notably in crafting the screenplay. That is not to say that Dalton Trumbo’s dialogue is without merit; on the contrary, there is a wealth of it. There is the relief of Charles Laughton’s cynical, decadent old Gracchus, who when informed by Peter Ustinov’s Batiatus that he’s “…found something I never had with all my wealth…dignity,” says, “In Rome, dignity shortens life, even more surely than disease.”

Much credit should go to Saul Bass. Bass is the most famous graphic designer in film history for his revolutionary opening title sequences, often combining animation and live action to create energetic film credits which sucked the viewer into a film in a way that had never been done before. His most famous sequences are the ones in The Man with the Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. While the one he designed for Spartacus is not one of his most dynamic, his contributions to the film went beyond title design. He scouted locations, worked on set design, and single-handedly blueprinted the battle scenes of the film. “He storyboarded the scene in which the slaves break down the fence of the gladiator school and originated the concept of the slaves’ using the fence as a weapon” (LoBrutto, 171). He also was responsible for thinking up the ingenious concept of the flaming logs that Spartacus’s army roll down the hill at the charging Romans. Spartacus has the look and the impact of many different collaborators’ achievements and failures being stirred together in the same pot, which gives it the ultimate, vaguely dissatisfying feeling of not cohering into one visionary whole.

Spartacus has many of Kubrick’s stylistic touches, but the actual story has zero: no subversive humor, no lack of sentimentality, no wicked perversity. The film does end mostly tragic and carries an inexorable gloom, but it has a generic sort of pessimism, glum, without Kubrick’s impish gallows humor. Another massive deficiency is the lighting and photography – reading about Kubrick on the set of Spartacus, it is clear that he showed a once in a lifetime complacency about the film he was working on. In Vincent LoBrutto’s Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, he writes, “Although Kubrick was under the enormous pressure of an epic production and having to cope with ubiquitous power struggles, his disengagement from a film that wasn’t really his and his inbred sense of dark humor helped move him through the project.” While he was uncompromising about many things, the long takes, calling for scenes to be covered in every possible angle, the shooting ratio (the ratio between the total duration of footage shot for a film and the footage which results from its final cut), he did not show his characteristic attention to the lighting as he had in The Killing and Paths of Glory. This could have been a result of the open hostility from Spartacus director of photography, Russell Metty, who was heard to say, “Let’s get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off the crane” (LoBrutto, 185). There was much in-fighting between the two on the set, all of which Kubrick endured without raising his voice or becoming angry, another sign of his disengagement from Spartacus. Anyone who has watched Vivian Kubrick’s 35-minute documentary detailing the making of The Shining, has witnessed Stanley Kubrick being disquietingly irascible with Shelley Duvall.

He just didn’t care as much, and it shows. There isn’t a hint of the brilliant Expressionistic lighting of The Killing and Paths of Glory, the very thing that made those films so astonishing. In Spartacus, the photography is adequate, but not particularly interesting to look at: the daylight scenes are too bright and the night scenes are too murky. Indeed, Spartacus has the least impressive cinematography of the 11 Kubrick films I’ve seen. Considered alone, it is a fine handsome epic, but among Kubrick’s oeuvre, it is an unfortunate weak spot.


Grade: B

Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur (1942)

In my ongoing quest to devour the complete works of all the important directors in the Film canon, I considered that it might be helpful to start from the beginning and develop a structured road map. Being a student of the Auteur Theory, and gravitating towards formalists, I thought it might be best to fill in the Hitchcock gaps. So I'm going to attempt to make my way through all 14 films of Alfred Hitchock's The Masterpiece Collection 14-Disc Box Set. I still plan on rewatching the 7 in there that I've already seen.


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Saboteur is famous for its ending struggle atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and I once watched a behind-the-scenes video detailing the construction of the life-size model of the upper portion of the statue’s left hand during a Hitchcock exhibit at Universal Studios. Everything about this scene (the final scene in the film) is wildly innovative, but I did not know how exceptionally well the rest of Saboteur would hold up. It is an astonishing precursor to Hitchcock’s much more celebrated action thriller North by Northwest, a precursor in story (an innocent man is framed for a crime committed by a small handful of wealthy conspirators and is on the run) and astonishing because the black-and-white earlier film is as thrilling and sharp as North by Northwest was in 1959. Even in 2008, the film moves briskly and displays a wide variety of influential story developments. The fugitive, Barry Kane (Robert Cummings) is apprehended by the police and sits, handcuffed, in the backseat of a cop car. As the car is stalled behind some trucks on a bridge overlooking a river, Kane asks for a cigarette. When the cop reaches in his pocket, Kane clobbers him on the head, dashes out onto the bridge, and with no other opportunities available, steps up onto the railing, and in a spectacular long-distance shot, is filmed leaping from the bridge and plummeting down, down, down into the river.

This an entire five decades before Richard Kimble’s suicidal leap of faith off a dam viaduct.

Robert Cummings is of the bland & dashing variety of movie heroes. He does play harried really well, and his character often must find creative methods to elude the authorities. At one point, he even made me feel ashamed for wishing he would be more ruthless in his self-preservation: he is traveling with a young woman, Patricia (Priscilla Lane) who intends on turning him into the police, and has him in a bind – she has wrangled his handcuffed hands behind the wheel as she drives. He manages to get control of the vehicle and stops it in the middle of a lonely country road. She gets out and informs him that she’ll flag down the next car that comes by and tell them that he is a dangerous fugitive. While she stands out farther down the road, a car appears on the horizon. He craftily unlatches the hood of her car, and holds the chain of his handcuffs into the motor fan.







Hitchcock edits breathlessly between the car gaining proximity to Patricia and closer and closer shots of sparks flying off the chain as it is frictioned against the spinning motor fan.


At the last second, the chain snaps, and he gets back behind the wheel as the car coming in the opposite direction on the left side of the road halts next to Patricia who is standing on the right side of the road, directly in his path. Compulsively, I thought, “just drive over her and speed out of there,” which of course, if he did, would render the entire point of his dilemma moot. That might make for an interesting film premise, though: a guilty man on the run for the one crime that he didn’t commit, though he’d be the only one rooting for him. Instead Cummings stops the car in front of her and grabs her to come along with him. Patricia goes from being combative to feeling dubious about his claims of innocence to finally being convinced of it.




Priscilla Lane is a lovely and endearing actress and becomes increasingly more so as Barry and Patricia forge ahead into the knotty conspiracy.


As for Barry Kane, Cummings makes the commonly-considered-to-be-boring good guy role look unusually alluring. The entire film, in fact, makes playing the good guy look far more compelling than being one of the elitist, treacherous villains, of whom the head, Charles Tobin (Otto Kruger), coolly proselytizes to Kane about the superiority of playing the duplicitous fair-weather friend during the country’s uncertain transitional period of fighting overseas:

“You're one of the ardent believers - a good American. Oh, there are millions like you. People who plod along, without asking questions. I hate to use the word stupid, but it seems to be the only one that applies. The great masses, the moron millions. Well, there are a few of us unwilling to just troop along... a few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small complacent lives, a few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr. Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.”

Kane: “Yeah. They get things done. They bomb cities, sink ships, torture and murder so you and your friends can eat off of gold plate; it’s a great philosophy.”

Tobin: “I neither intend to be bombed nor sunk, Mr. Kane. That’s why I’m leaving now. And if things don’t arrive for you, if, uh…we should win, then I’ll come back.”

I would be far less tolerant of such malevolent exposition (or as Ebert labels such speeches, “The Talking Killer”) in a current film, but different criterion must be employed for a film made in 1942. The thing that made Hitchcock, like Kubrick after him, stand out from his peers, was his ingenuity and sense of humor and pacing. Many films from the 1940s would be absolutely interminable at this point, but Saboteur only has one scene (involving Kane speaking to the mother of a dead friend) that is sluggish. There is even a bizarre detour where Kane and Patricia hop a ride with a traveling Circus troupe à la Carnivàle, and in conversation with a dyspeptic midget, a kindly thin man, Bones, known as “The Human Skeleton,” a pair of warring conjoined twin sisters, and a bearded lady named Esmeralda. Reluctant to reveal that he is the fugitive that’s been talked about on the radio, Barry explains that their car broke down on a side road. “I know. A moonlight night and a parked car. That’s nice,” says the bearded lady, who is then rebuked by Bones, “Esmeralda! Everywhere you search for sex. Get your eyes out of the mud and look up at the stars!” Lodz might say she has a “singularly prurient mind.”

The film has Hitchcock’s trademark virtuoso orchestration, propelling an action story ahead of its time in artistry and thrills that culminates in a striking climax atop a famous American monument just as it did in North By Northwest (Mount Rushmore in that film). There are sumptuous, detailed images such as a hangar door slowly opening to allow entry to a multitude of shadowed workers...





...and simpler images that resonate powerfully with a primal force such as the image of a man’s seized arm struggling to reach a button to detonate an explosive with his finger or the way the absence of a score underlines and exaggerates the terrible urgency of watching a man hanging on for dear life over a dizzying fall.





There are self-aware images cleverly obscuring the line between reality and the movies as when Kane chases the real saboteur into a crowded movie theater in the middle of a screening and the man runs behind the giant screen. We see his tiny silhouette dwarfed by the massive backdrop of the theater-projected image, and the tiny silhouette fires a gun as the characters in the movie exchange gun fire.

A man in the audience is shot and slumps over, but it takes a while for anyone to notice as the real gunshot has been covered (a similar incident occurs in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) when an assassination attempt at a symphony is planned so that the gunshot coincides with the crash of a cymbal).

Saboteur has some inevitable anachronistic clunkiness here and there, but the whole enterprise still works splendidly in 2008. In 1942, Hitchcock’s work was the very definition of cutting edge.


Grade: A