finnegan’s film blog

My expectations were high, but the aptly titled Dark Knight didn’t disappoint.

Without a doubt the darkest and most complex Batman film to date, The Dark Knight teeters somewhere between the action, suspense and horror genres. It’s the sort of big budget “popcorn” action film I could imagine Alfred Hitchcock enjoying. And like all really good films, it has multiple layers: mental, political, metaphysical and emotional.

Where the overriding theme of Batman Begins was fear, the themes that emerge in The Dark Knight seem to be terror, hope and anarchy. Batman knocks the criminal underworld out of balance, and gets an equal and opposite reaction. At times over the top — some of the chase sequences were unnecessarily long and confusing — the majority of the film remains rooted in a dark reality (insofar as comic book films can be realistic). Compared to Batman Begins, Director Christopher Nolan pulls back even further from the pulpy worlds of Tim Burton’s Batman films, and Frank Miller’s Sin City, and paints a picture of a very believable and corrupt Gotham.

I couldn’t help but associate the character of Harvey Dent, Gotham’s District Attorney, with Barack Obama; a public figure that the masses look up to and invest their hope in. And that’s a big part of what the Batman stories have always been about: symbols. Symbols of hope, symbols of fear. Nolan and the talented cast communicate these symbols very effectively. There were moments where I was scared of the Joker in the same sense I was scared of Anton Sugur, the cold-blooded killer from No Country For Old Men. I didn’t feel safe sitting in my seat. Heath Ledger’s portrayal as the charismatic anarchist clown is truly terrifying.

One comment I overheard on the way out of the theater was that the movie was too long. I found this comment odd, because I’ve always thought the Batman films are (or should be) like good roller coasters, with plenty of nail-biting twists and turns. I find it so disappointing when the ride is so much shorter than the time you spent standing in line. So, I say, “bring on the long, twisty roller coaster and give me my money’s worth.”

And The Dark Knight does just that.

I intend to see this film at least once more before it leaves theaters.

Better than the majority of this decade’s superhero movies.

I saw this a week ago, but have been too busy to post anything.

Most moviegoers aren’t comic book geeks, and won’t know (or care) that the original Iron Man was “born” in Vietnam in the early 1960s. But the story is made much more relevant by placing the protagonist, Tony Stark, in U.S. occupied, modern-day Afghanistan. The millionaire playboy, the technological innovations, the warlord kidnappers: it all works better as adapted in this Jon Favreau film.

And moreso than any other superhero movie I can think of, the film is dominated by Stark’s character (played with gusto by Robert Downey Jr.) rather than outside forces of antagonism. It’s certainly a performance-driven movie. In fact, I don’t know if Iron Man would have worked at all if Downey hadn’t played Stark the way he did.

“Every war is different. Every war is the same,” says US Marine Tony Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), and he’s right. Every war is the same. They all have soldiers and they all have fighting. But Jarhead is a movie about a company of soldiers in a war that didn’t provide good material for a war movie. So director Sam Mendes and screenwriter William Broyles Jr. did something a little different.

Their troubled antihero endures boot camp in the states, and is among the first US soldiers to set foot on Saudi sand in the military buildup leading to Operation Desert Storm. Swofford and his fellow Marines pitch tents and wait for “the suck” to begin. And wait. Back home, girlfriends cheat, the media reports, and wives divorce. And still they wait.

While Jarhead is not your typical war film, it’s not a typical anti-war movie either. Like HBO’s Band of Brothers, Jarhead is a first-hand account of a soldier’s life during wartime, plain and simple. It doesn’t avoid a point of view because Mendes is afraid to make a solid statement; it avoids definitive statements because the soldiers themselves are trained not to have any, and this is their story.

Jarhead will likely disappoint those expecting profound political statements, as well as those wanting to see the next Saving Private Ryan. Jarhead is part of a newer canon of movies that has already begun to erode our preconceived notions of what a war film should be. Where’s the climactic battle scene where the protagonist learns a valuable lesson? For that matter, where’s the battle scene?

As the nature of ground wars drastically change, so change war movies. What was considered anti-war in the 1970s has practically become standard GI indoctrination in the world of Jarhead. At a screening of Copolla’s Apocalypse Now, a room full of bloodthirsty Marines hum the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries” and reenact every moment of the film with feverish intensity. The meaning of the original becomes perverted in the context of the scene. In another, the Marines–the very fingers of the Pentagon–dance around a bonfire chanting Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” even though they are the power.

Mendes and company intentionally keep certain things cloudy, such as the point of the war: is it justified or is it evil? That’s not what the movie is about. But other points are clear: any inkling of glory and honor that may have been connected with wars in the past has been snuffed out. The soldiers are the antagonists. Like a pack of starving wild dogs, the Marines turn on each other in the absence of “the suck.” They prey on each others’ weaknesses for the lack of something better to do.

Jarhead is a war movie befitting the war it’s about, but it’s bound to leave people scratching their heads. Perhaps the point of the movie is to get us to ask ourselves “what’s the point?” What’s the point of war? Isn’t there something eerie and unnatural about modern man’s need for petroleum? Jarhead is a tough one to figure out. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And for the sake of our troops in Iraq right now, we had better try.

The Corporation is a good example of a political documentary that is free of the emotion-evoking propaganda prevalent in many high-grossing docs these days. The filmmaker’s level-headed approach results in a seemingly well-balanced (albeit decidedly leftist) informational film that is easy to hate, but hard to argue with. It has enough corporate blunders to make even the most calloused business student shake his head. The revelation that 9-11 was a welcomed blessing for Wall Street traders might even make you wish that the planes had crashed into the NYSE instead of the Twin Towers.

The Corporation’s Achilles heel is the massive scope of the subject. From Noam Chomsky to advertising executives to Howard Zinn to the head of the Shell corporation to a carpet tycoon to Michael Moore, the interviewees run the gamut. I counted at least 17 different talking heads in the film (no doubt there are more) and each interview excerpt is so short that you don’t really get a sense of the individual viewpoints represented. I’m sure that the filmmakers included this range of voices under the banner of equal representation, but keeping up with who is saying what is a bit daunting for the viewer. Also, the Monsanto “Posilac cover-up” story seemed too large a tangent to blend with the rest of the film. Perhaps that should have been relegated to a separate mini-documentary to be included on the DVD.

As with most political documentaries, chances are your like or dislike of this film will depend heavily on the political views you walk into the theater with. For those of us who question consumerism, The Corporation is a re-affirming and eye-opening experience. Through the filmmaker’s eyes, we get a glimpse of a world not unlike The Matrix: a place where corporations have covered the earth in such a thick layer of advertisements that we have no idea what life could be like without them.