Archive for August, 2010

The Dark Knight

Christopher Nolan follows up his 2005 film Batman Begins with a darker, more sinister and entirely gripping sequel, The Dark Knight. At the end of Batman Begins the Gotham City police chief James Gordon played with great subtlety by Gary Oldman hands Bruce Wayne a calling card for the a new breed of criminal. Wayne, or his alter ego Batman flips over the card and all we see is The Joker, a suggestion that a sequel is definitely in the pipeline. With Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman reprising their roles, who was to be cast as the ultimate villain? The role of the Joker, first made famous by a more jovial and naughty Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman in the late 1980’s was reinvented with a more anarchistic alacrity by the hugely talented Heath Ledger, fresh from his Oscar-nominated role in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.

So with the casting of the film pretty much sorted only with the slight change of Maggie Gyllenhaal taking on the role of female lead character Rachel Dawes, played in Batman Begins by the pre-Tom Cruise wedded Katie Holmes, all seemed clear sailing. In January 2008 tragedy struck with the unexpected and premature death of Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight’s main draw card, and an eerie and tragic shadow was cast over the release of the film, for it was to become Heath Ledger’s last completed movie and more significantly his final and most intense cinematic impression ever. So when The Dark Knight was released in July simultaneously in cinemas around the globe, the hype was not only about the best sequel ever, it was largely attributed to Ledger’s brilliant and overtly sinister portrayal of Batman’s arch nemesis, The Joker. Ledger deservedly won the Oscar post-humously for Best Supporting Actor for this film, the second actor in cinema history since Peter Finch won for Network.

So naturally, like any avid cineaste, I couldn’t wait to see the final movie. Having followed Christopher Nolan’s previous works from the bizarre Memento to the excellent 2006 film The Prestige

Magic is an illusion and ambition a killer

I knew that The Dark Knight would be in exceptionally talented hands. The Dark Knight, like the trailer suggests, will literally blow any audience viewer away or transfix them to their seat with visuals and cutting edge sound so spectacular it’s hard to realize that two and a half hours have passed. A high-octane and visually spectacular movie with one great action sequence followed by another, punctuated by superb performances not only by Ledger as the Joker, but by Christian Bale, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhart who takes on the wonderfully ambiguous part of District Attorney Harvey Dent. Gotham is a simulacrum of any large American metropolis, a sinister and shadowy mix of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, where corporate greed fits like a glove with psychotic criminals, ruthless mobsters and a city whose citizens have clearly lost their souls.

For this Joker, a spine-chillingly brilliant and maniacal performance by Heath Ledger, does not have a goal just as long as he is content with wreaking mass destruction, he is purely doing it so anarchy can reign supreme. Prisoners are not an option and nothing is spared as violent and malignant retribution for all the evil that was inflicted on him as a character. The Joker simply is a delusional psychopath with no particular empathy for any moral order or social consequence, let alone a superior and well-meaning hero like Batman, the once brave and fabulously wealthy Bruce Wayne. The Dark Knight is undeniably the best film in ages, for everything is of vastly superior quality from the superb action sequences, senseless and conniving villains, to the exhilarating aerial shots of Gotham and Hong Kong, combined with the elegance of the ultra wealthy urbanized set contrasted by the violent and devious criminals which seek to undermine all that was once sacred. The technical aspects of the film are brilliant from the sound editing, to the slick pace, insures that at  two and a half hours, one is never bored, one is shocked into a state of frenzied captivation, entranced by a film so expansive and devouring, refined and slick, scary and ultimately very intense. Don’t miss this spectacular sequel on the big screen, it is entirely beyond anything one can even comprehend. As for the late Heath Ledger, one really wonders who is having the last laugh.

The Joker?

Ledgers Iconic final performance

INCEPTION

Often when you awaken from a dream, there is that split second where you are not sure if you are still dreaming or you have in fact come back to reality. Inception explores that split second and makes an ambitious two hour feature out of that very sense of disorientation.

Christopher Nolan’sdreamworld vision amplified in Inception is an impressive film by the sheer scale of invention, the pace of the action and the intricacy of the plot leaving many a viewer to ponder diverse interpretations. Isn’t that what our dreams are about?  Open to diverse interpretations?

Where dreams are shifting landscapes

After the huge success of The Dark Knight featuring the legendary performance by Heath Ledger, Nolan had to follow up that film with an equally brilliant achievement. With a dream cast including a bunch of Oscar nominated actors from Leonardo di Caprio, to Ellen Page from Juno, to Oscar winner Marion Cotillard from La Vie en Rose supported by Michael Caine, the hugely-underrated Joseph Gorden-Levitt to Ken Watanabe, Inception follows a layered structured narrative with simultaneous action sequences occurring weaving in the notion of merging reality with dreams and how the dreamscape can shift unexpectedly. Christopher Nolan debut on the international cinema scene almost 10 years ago with the brilliant 2001 film Memento

Murder can be a series of images

whose central character has to shift through amnesia to discover whether he committed a murder to the more recent The Prestige followed by the phenomenal success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Nolan inhabits the darker recesses of the human psyche and brings a unique quality to every film he creates.

As for his trademarks as a director, watch out for breathtaking shots of Tokyo and Mombasa and taut sequences with explosions and multiple action sequences in Inception. Now that Nolan commands the respect of Hollywood his budgets are bigger and his vision is uncompromising, he is mainstream filmmaker with a twist, coaxing superb performances out of his lead characters from Heath Ledgers unforgettably dark portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight to Christian Bale’s tortured magician in Victorian England in The Prestige. Here in Inception, Marion Cotillard shines as Mal, Cobb’s long last wife along with Leonardo di Caprio as the central character Cobb using dreams to reconstruct a voyage into his guilt-ridden past.

Inception is a film that will torment the viewer in its post-structural form and psychological interpretations are rampant, demonstrating that Nolan is influenced by some mind-altering science fiction classics like Blade Runner and Solaris, as dreams merge with reality. For the dreamscape is emotional and projections are purely there to torment the dreamer or guide them to the inner depths of an already fragmented subconscious, forcing the characters into deeper levels of their own imagination and ultimately grasping for a reality which is inconceivable. Freud would have had a field day with Inception, as dreams, memories, aging and time is altered beyond recognition into a gripping post-linear filmic structure. Like The Dark Knight, the sound editing on Inception is brilliant and is definitely worth viewing in a large surround sound theatre especially to feel and witness the enormity of the directors vision, pace and peculiarities. In The Dark Knight anarchy reigned supreme, whereas in Inception dreams merge into reality and the spinning top remains symbolic.

Creation

Jon Amiel’s film Creation is a thought-provoking and beautifully crafted story about Charles Darwin who went up against Victorian religious principles and published the ground-breaking book entitled Origin of Species in 1859.

Darwin’s Origin of the Species was a seminal work and changed forever the way man viewed himself, his position on this planet and his relationship with his God. That is Western Man. Darwin after having traveled far and wide from Australia to Tierra del Fuego on the tip of South America and most notably to Islands near Borneo, witnessing a wide range of the most fascinating aspects of nature and of the various inhabitants of these exotic lands returned to Victorian England and expounded the theory of natural selection, how man and beast are all linked through years of gradual mutation and survival of different species. How man itself is very much part of Nature and not the masters of it.

Creation is a film that will haunt the viewer with great images, superb cinematography and taut and compelling performances by the underated Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly, the devoted wife and his first cousin Emma Westwood, also mother of his children who turns to God as refuge after the death of their eldest daughter. Both of them as parents suffer themselves for the scientific theory of survival of the fittest. Bettany as Darwin is outstanding as a man who initially is grappling to come to terms with the loss of a child but also the realization that his findings and work whilst not only be true will also shake the moral fibre of Victorian society who were bound by the book of Genesis and the notion that on the 7^th day God created man to be the carer of all the forms of life found on this planet.

Darwin’s theory of evolution that man had evolved over millions of years from mammals like Monkeys and Orangutans was ground breaking and opened up a whole range of scientific, religious and anthropological debates about nature versus nurture, biological similarities and eventually paved the way for man to better understand the environment he was living in and how he was an intricate part of its evolution over millions of years. Creation as a film centres on Darwin’s anguish as a father, a writer and the realization that his discoveries were groundbreaking only to be proven correct by fellow scientists in the Spice Islands, overcoming the conflicts of religion and faith allowing him to publish the Origin of Species. Jon Amiel’s filmic reference is rich taking from Jane Campion’s The Piano to similar period films about the Victorian quest for discovery such as Mountains on the Moon and Greystoke: Lord of the Apes.

Lord of the Apes

Jennifer Connelly holds her own as the wife of a genius, a role very similar to what she played in her Oscar winning performance as the wife of brilliant but delusional Princeton mathematician John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

Creation is a period drama focusing on the anguish of writing a seminal work and the events and inner demons that a writer suffers during his own private moments of creativity, more about the anguish of writing than the repercussions that will follow publication. Stark Victorian scenery is reminiscent of Capote whilst he battles to grasp the complexity of the Clutter killings in 1950’s desolate Kansas and the effects of capital punishment. As cinema Capote is more riveting whilst Creation is certainly as compelling yet lacks in the power to make it a contender on Oscar night relegating it to that film about Charles Darwin.  Notwithstanding Creation is worth watching even as a talking point about concepts which as man, we simply now in the 21^st century take for granted. Man is evolving every day and nature is keeping that evolution in check despite the advancements of technology.