Christopher Nolan's Following (1998)

“I’d been on my own for a while and been getting kind of lonely…and bored…How can I explain?...”

-“The Young Man”

Following was written by Christopher Nolan and I cannot deny that, here, the man has a curiosity about human behavior that is no doubt sophisticated and that has inspired him to contrive a compact little thriller of singular inventiveness and unpretentious cynicism.

The film is aesthetically interesting, but mostly because it was shot in suitably grainy black and white, which gives it a gritty, bleak noir quality. Nolan continues to confirm that he is sloppy in framing his shots, generally paying little to no attention to composition. When I have said in my past two reviews of Nolan films that his direction is merely functional I mean that he is concerned more with telling a story through dialogue than through images. Films like Memento and this are compelling because of the story, and not so much the images, though he does show evidence of an artistic eye here and there. I’d recommend that if he wishes to achieve the sort of painterly craftsmanship of peers like Guillermo Del Toro or Darren Aronofsky, that he should try storyboarding before just going in and roughly shooting.

Perhaps I am being overly critical in expecting him to do more than tell an interesting story, which he usually does, especially here, but if he simply wished to do that, he could work in a different field, perhaps as a novelist or screenwriter. A filmmaker must provide indelible images, strong, layered images precisely framed and calibrated. There are only a few images in Following that could be paused to admire for purposes of mise-en-scène study. I would say I found this film to be very promising except I know that five films and ten years later he has hardly delivered on it. Nonetheless, he is a clever and skilled scenarist.

Following tells the brief but ingenious story of a young man (Jeremy Theobald), credited simply as “The Young Man,” who has aspirations of being a writer. He has time to kill, and begins indulging in the peculiar habit of following strangers he notices on the street:

“You ever, um, been to a football match, just let your eyes, um, go over, drift across a crowd of people and then they slowly stop and fix on one person and…all of a sudden that person isn’t part of the crowd anymore. They’ve become an individual, just like that.”

He explains this to an older man who is insinuated to be a therapist (if this was intentionally insinuated, then Nolan must be commended for having his uncle, John Nolan, play the part, as he looks and sounds like a therapist).

That sample of dialogue offers a tantalizing peek into a mind that is not morbidly curious so much as lonesome and hungry for a connection. The tragedy of his story is that this very poignant yearning is taken advantage of and cruelly manipulated to quietly devastating results. One of the people he eventually starts to “shadow” is a tall young man with deep-set eyes and a cunning demeanor. The man is Cobb, and the actor who plays him, Alex Haw, has the height and commanding presence of Vince Vaughn with the suave handsomeness of Jude Law and the cold malice of Arno Frisch. The man is fascinating, but also very likely trouble of an uncertain nature.

The scenes with Cobb are involving – his motives are unknown, his past is unknown, and he is prodigiously capable not only in his chosen profession (as a burglar and con artist) but also in navigating sticky situations to extricate himself. One of the best scenes finds the young man caught by his latest pursuit in a coffee shop. The stranger abruptly confronts him and asks if he knows him, what he wants, if he’s “a faggot” and upon receiving the bizarre but innocent explanation, reveals his name to be Cobb, and invites our protagonist to tag along for one of his break-ins. Things become considerably more sinister here, as the young man, once content merely to observe strangers coming to and from, now is inside their homes, examining their personal belongings.

While also compelling on a purely superficial level, there is interest within deeper levels: a normal, law-abiding young man who does not do wicked things but whose curiosity about them leads him into dark circles that threaten his character; out of the frying pan of loneliness and boredom and into the fire of crime and sociopathy. The premise is ingenious in its simplicity, and in that simplicity, Nolan finds a very novel idea. The film does expand into a crime thriller with intricate set-ups and double-crosses, as the story cleverly folds back in on itself, sort of like Memento, only without the logic holes.

Nolan has shrewdly produced a tragic little noir that might have very well been a minor masterpiece if he were a more gifted director, but I must admire him for seeing such vast potential in such a curious little premise and mining a sturdy foothold for himself out of it upon which to advance a career.




Grade: B+

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-