Film Review | The Dark Knight Rises

Dark and Stormy Knight

by Thomas Delapa

Holy overkill, Batman!

In The Dark Knight Rises, the Caped Crusader flies out of retirement, loses all his money and Alfred, gets the guano beaten out of him, and has to save Gotham City from a masked madman with an atomic bomb. 

Whew, all this for one superhero with no real super powers. Where are the Avengers when you need them?

In the final installment from the dynamic box-office duo of director Christopher Nolan and star Christian Bale, Batman seriously loses his mojo, again. The operative word here is ”serious,” as Nolan morphs his brooding comic-book incarnation into a hooded Hamlet. To agonized alter ego Bruce Wayne, to be Batman or not to be Batman, that is the lofty question.

Hobbled and a recluse after his epic battles with the Joker, Bruce Wayne falls to a new low before he’s roused out of semi-retirement. First his mother’s pearls are stolen by a crafty cat burglar and then a mysterious, hulking mastermind orchestrates an uber-hostile takeover of Wayne Enterprises. In these dire and depressing times, neither Wayne nor Batman is too big to fail. 

Zeitgeist watchers will note that Batman’s capital new bane is Bane (Tom Hardy), whose new boss may or not be Bain Capital’s Mitt Romney. This Bane is a Humongous-like thug (see: Road Warrior) who mellifluously speaks through a metal muzzle. When you can understand what he’s saying, he comes across like a campy Darth Vader minus the cape and charm. Except for the prospect of Chapter 7 bankruptcy, he’s Bruce Wayne’s biggest, baddest stress test yet.  

For all the millions (reportedly upwards of 250) squandered on this production, Batman’s swan song looks and sounds pretty much like a clone of any elephantine action movie. Long gone are the moody gothic designs and lighter touch of the Tim Burton series, replaced by a blandly modern Manhattan and cardboard villains. The only new toy in Batman’s arsenal  is a “Bat” fighter jet that looks like, yes, a big metallic bat. Despite the ultra-modernistic design, its options don't include an auto-pilot, an oversight only flown in as a plot gimmick. 

In this B(r)at Pack entry, Hollywood ageism is the greatest stealth enemy. Not unlike the Harry Potter series, talented pros like Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are pushed into the wings while the spotlight switches to minimal millennials like Anne Hathaway as Catwoman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, cast as an idealistic cop who wants to see Batman flap back into the swing of things. In skin-tight black leather and leading with her rear end, Hathaway is neither cat nor sexy kitten, only a kid actress who couldn’t carry Michelle Pfeiffer’s high heels. Reprising his throwaway role as the super-hapless Commissioner Gordon, Gary Oldman’s American accent is so forced he always seems to be throwing his voice from inside the Bat Cave. And if you’re looking for romance from this errant Knight, the best you’ll get are the bromantic weepy-eyed looks that Caine’s Alfred shoots at Master Wayne.

In the ups and downs of Batman’s last flight, not only must he battle the baddies and his own demons, but also Manhattan’s nasty 99%, who are unleashed as part of Bane’s suspiciously pinko plan of mass destruction. Once the urban masses take over the city, they set up kangaroo courts that send the rich and powerful hopping to their deaths across a frozen river. During the anarchy, Batman finds himself hurled into a prison hell-hole—literally—where his Herculean task involves an extreme messianic ascent that might go over big at the X Games. 

It’s all batty and super-pretentious, and any snickers that may arise will be muffled by the noise and Bale’s obliviously earnest performance, equal parts Dirty Harry and Jane Eyre’s Rochester. If this movie is a tragedy of sorts, as it so wants to be, it’s only because of the horrific real-life events that will forever shadow it. Otherwise, the joke is on the audience. Seriously. 

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8/19/12

Denver's Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre -- "Film on Fridays"

Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre’s “Film On Fridays” Lights Up the Summer Skies

Step to the front tomorrow night, July 20, as the Historic Elitch Gardens Theatre's outdoor film series proudly presents Alfred Hitchcock's brilliant REAR WINDOW (1954), featuring a remarkable three Elitch acting alumnus: Grace Kelly and Raymond Burr, along with Wendell Corey.

Only 21 and a relatively unknown Broadway and TV actress, Kelly was reportedly paid $125/per week for the summer as an ingenue, appearing in eight 1951 productions, including The Man Who Came to Dinner. She lived for the summer in a basement apartment with her mother at 4020 Raleigh St, often riding a bike to rehearsals. Backstage on Aug. 10, Kelly received the famous telegram from producer Stanley Kramer asking her if she could come to Hollywood to co-star opposite Gary Cooper in High Noon. This and other roles led to her three-film association with the celebrated director Alfred Hitchcock, beginning with Dial M for Murder in 1954. She would famously marry Prince Rainier of Monaco in 1956 and become Princess Grace Grimaldi of Monaco, retiring from acting.

Raymond Burr, of course, would go on to great fame after several Hollywood films as TV's Perry Mason in 1957 and, later Ironsides. Burr was a terrific friend to Denver, filming several episodes of his Perry Mason TV movies here (at the former Bonfils/Lowenstein Theater) in the 1980s and 1990s. He also raised millions of dollars for Denver educational and medical facilities.

Tickets: $5 suggested donation, with Elitch Theatre Members and kids under 14 free. Lawn seating begins at 7 pm, with the film at dusk, preceded by live music and tours. Grab your lawn chairs and blankets, but you won't need your binoculars! 

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Projected in authentic 35mm prints whenever possible, Elitch's Film on Fridays is "Keeping it Reel," offering a diverse lineup for young and old ranging from director Billy Wilder’s Oscar-winning Sunset Boulevard to Mel Brooks’ ageless comedy Young Frankenstein. Curated by Thomas Delapa, Film on Friday's includes rare prints from the UCLA Film & TV Archive, NBC Universal, Criterion Pictures and Swank Motion Pictures. All proceeds go to the theater’s renovation campaign as a landmark performance-arts center. The Elitch Theatre is located at 4500 W. 38th Ave (at Utica), Denver, CO 80212. More information at http://www.historicelitchtheatre.org and on Facebook.

Remaining Schedule: 

Aug. 3 – Sunset Boulevard (1950), directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gloria Swanson (Elitch’s, 1967) and William Holden, with Cecil B. DeMille (Elitch’s, 1905)

Aug. 17 – Beetlejuice (1988), directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton and Sylvia Sidney (Elitch’s, 1928)

Sept. 7 – Stay tuned for surprise sci-fi classic!

Sept. 14 – Young Frankenstein (1974), directed by Mel Brooks and starring Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman (Elitch’s, 1983, 1986)

About the Historic Elitch Theatre

The Historic Elitch Theatre’s mission is to create a vibrant, multidisciplinary cultural arts center in Northwest Denver that strengthens and engages the community through innovative live arts programming accessible to a diverse public.

The Elitch Theatre has been an important part of Colorado’s cultural landscape since its inception in 1891. It was the first cultural center in Colorado, and is the oldest summer stock theater in the nation. In 1896, it was also the site of one of the West's first showings of Thomas Edison's "Vitascope" motion pictures. Many pioneers and famous faces such as Grace Kelly, Douglas Fairbanks, Edward G. Robinson, Sylvia Sidney, Raymond Burr, Patricia Neal, Cecil B. DeMille, and Robert Redford, to name a few, passed through this iconic American theater at one point in their careers. One early star at Elitch’s was only 15 years old when she first appeared on the Elitch Theatre stage and was called “Tony” for short. This Denver girl grew up to be the famous Broadway producer, Antoinette Perry, for whom the Tony Awards are named. The Elitch Theatre delighted Denver audiences for 100 years, with the last production occurring in 1991. In 1931, DeMille called it "one of the greatest cradles of the drama in American history.''

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Film review | Moonrise Kingdom

The Emperor’s New Khakis

By Thomas Delapa

Well, at least one critic got it right.

“This summer’s sleeper hit” proclaimed Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post of director Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom.

As an aside from the popcorn gallery, I’ll just say, “My kingdom for a No-Doz.”

An arid heir to recent Anderson live-action films like The Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, this Kingdom is anything but wild. Set in 1965 (for no apparent reason) on a mythical New England island (for no apparent reason), it’s the soporific study of an runaway boy scout who teams up with a misfit girl. Imagine a kiddie Badlands or a washed-out Blue Lagoon. However you picture it, it’s no good.

After showing such sparkling promise in his 1996 Bottle Rocket debut and reaching the heights in The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson’s talent and imagination have fizzled. Sure, he’s still crafting his meticulously composed vignettes of wry Americana, but his story sense—never much more than plebian—has lately been a dud. When you’re watching a Wes Anderson movie, you keep looking around wondering if anyone else (besides his actors) is in on the joke.

Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola (scion of the Francis Coppola house) dream up “New Penzance Island,” a bucolic backwater where adults act like kids and kids act like adults. At Camp Ivanhoe, upright, uptight Scoutmaster Ward (Edward Norton) is in charge, browbeating his boys with quaint threats and exclamations like “Jiminy Cricket!” All of them get in line except one: Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman), a precocious bespectacled boy in a coonskin cap who goes AWOL from his pup tent and embarks on an oddball odyssey into the wild.

But this movie deserves no merit badges, except for Pretension and Quirkiness. It’s dressed up with nowhere to go, accessorized with Anderson’s typically overstuffed tableaux, photographed in long, gratuitous dolly shots. Abetted by bloated budgets for art design, Anderson fills his frame with trinkets, doodads, graphics and decor that refer back to nothing in particular, except maybe his own airy, flea-market imagination. His and Coppola’s dialogue is equally arch, composed of non sequiturs fit for only a king of smug indie obscurity.

Sam’s journey leads to a romantic rendezvous with Suzy (Kara Hayward), his sulky, eye-shadowed queen in this L.L. Bean-flavored land of plaid and khaki. While adults in the fairy tale are sappy and tree-thick, at least Sam and Suzy are accorded a royal treatment.

Don’t be blinded by the glittery star court that Anderson has assembled—Bruce Willis, Frances McDormand, Tilda Swinton, and Norton, as well as frequent star Bill Murray—as they are all overshadowed by the aimless and lackluster story. While Anderson wants to give us a preppie, pipsqueak riff on Adam and Eve, his career now looks like a fool’s paradise.

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6/26/12

Film Re-view | Contempt/Le Mepris (1963)

Waiting for Godard 

by Thomas Delapa 


For those filmgoers who believe that world cinema is in desperate need of a renaissance, if not revolution, there's no better antidote than the re-release of Contempt, director Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 modernist masterwork now playing at Denver's Esquire Theatre for a limited run.

Godard, a key figure in the French New Wave that also gave us Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais, made Contempt (Le Mepris) four years after his breathtaking debut in Breathless. A freewheeling homage to the American gangster movie, Breathless made a star of Jean-Paul Belmondo and heralded Godard as a Picasso-like destroyer of the staid conventions of movie-making.

Relatively speaking, Contempt was Godard's first big-budget production. Based on a novel (A Ghost at Noon) by Italian author Alberto Moravia, it was financed by Carlo Ponti (Sophia Loren's husband) and shot on location in Rome and Capri. But what made it a cause celebre was the casting of Brigitte Bardot, then Europe's reigning sex goddess. "B.B." had burst (literally) upon the scene in 1956 in Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman, virtually redefining sexuality in the commercial film. With Bardot aboard, Godard hired Hollywood heavy Jack Palance, an unknown Michel Piccoli and legendary German director Fritz Lang to play himself.

Photographed on luscious widescreen color by Godard ace Raoul Coutard, Contempt is an exemplar introduction to a director who once signed his name, Jean-Luc "Cinema" Godard. It's a difficult, exhilarating film, crammed with allusions to painting, drama, music and other movies. In fact, the finished product was so upsetting to U.S. distributor Joseph E. Levine that Godard was forced to add a nude scene with Bardot, though even that was subverted by Godard the trickster.

From Moravia's novel, Godard extracted, in his words, the "story of a misunderstanding between a man and a woman." Paul (Piccoli) is French writer who's come to Rome's famed Cinecitta studios with his wife Camille (Bardot) at the request of an egomanical American producer, Prokosch (Palance). Prokosch is unhappy with the movie version of Homer's Odyssey being directed by Lang. Then in his seventies, Lang had behind him such landmarks as Metropolis and M and Hollywood hits The Big Heat and You Only Live Once. Art constantly intersects with life in Contempt; to wit, Godard himself appears as the Odyssey's assistant director.

Like his New Wave brethren--most former film critics--Godard was infatuated with the cinema's power and traditions. In the memorable opening, a camera approaches the screen as it follows an actress reading a book. At the end of the shot, the camera leaves her and turns in close-up to us. Godard never wants us to forget that camera, nor of the world it creates, "a world that responds to our desires," says the narrator, quoting the seminal French film critic Andre Bazin.

Film has given us our popular mythology, our equivalent to the Greek epics, but then Homer didn't have to deal with producers, agents and stars. To Godard, Lang acts as the conscience of film, a cultured man who labors with Sisyphean endurance to bring a faithful version of Homer to the screen. But off the set, it's Prokosch who has usurped the role of the gods. Though evidently he despised working for Godard, Palance is marvelous as a titan of venal vulgarity. "I like gods, I know how they feel," he pontificates, reading aphorisms out of a little red book.

Godard's allusions give Contempt a cultural density that's no so far from Joyce's own Ulysses or Eliot in The Waste Land. Homer's work, of course, is an epic of Ulysses' treacherous journey back to Greece after years away fighting in the Trojan War. While Homer's hero battles sea monsters and sirens on the way home, his loyal wife Penelope fends off a gaggle of suitors until his return.

In this tale of demi-gods and men, rarely can Godard's "shipwrecked victims of the modern world" live up to such noble deeds. They speak different languages and must use a translator (Giorgia Moll) in conversations. Paul is passive and cowardly, testing his wife's fidelity by allowing her to be alone with Prokosch. Bardot's Camille has the beauty of Helen, but is impulsive and enigmatic. For Godard, men and women are indeed ruled by different planets, embodied in the primal reds Bardot wears versus the cool blues of Piccoli.

A seer about contemporary gender relations, Godard pessimistically finds little common ground between the sexes. In a scene that lasts a full 30 minutes, Paul and Camille have a meandering, banal--but realistic--argument in their empty new apartment, literally going around in circles as studied by Coutard's fluid camera. Unlike the women of old, Camille isn't content to be merely an appendage to her husband's life, and this change for Paul has turned his love for her into an Achilles' heel.

But Contempt isn't merely talk. It's a gorgeous film, from the crystal blue waters off the island of Capri to Godard's meticulous compositions and Georges Delerue's ominous yet tender romantic score [which Martin Scorsese cribbed in 1995's Casino]. Godard's zeal for cinema is so intense that he visually "quotes" from a number of his favorites, such as Roberto Rossellini's Voyage in Italy and Lang's own silent Siegfried saga, thus adding complex layers of meaning to the story. When Lang tells his crew to prepare to shoot the "Cyclops scene," there's a cut to the camera, a modern one-eyed monster that's devoured many a mortal.

For a time in the heady 1960s, Godard and his daring and smart compatriots opened up the eyes and ears of a generation of hungry filmgoers. They blazed a trail into a new type of cinema that was challenging, literate and passionate. Today that trail is overgrown, ignored or trampled on by profiteers, contemptible celebrity seekers and a conspicuously less demanding public.

Ulysses made it home, but as a near 50-year-old Contempt sorely reminds us, world film today is adrift at sea.

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Originally published in Boulder Weekly 12/11/97; minor additions 4/23/12.
Contempt was released as two-disc DVD set by Criterion in 2002.

Film Review | Casino Royale (2006)

Chips and a Dip

by Thomas Delapa


When British actor Daniel Craig was first announced as the new James Bond, hardcore 007 fans went ballistic. "Bland, James Bland," they dubbed him. In his defense, Craig told Entertainment Weekly, "They hate me. They're passionate about it, but I do wish they'd reserve judgment."

Deal or no deal, judgment day has come for Craig and Casino Royale, the 21st Bond movie extravaganza. Get ready for a flush, because this blue-eyed and blond Bond has a license to bore.

In the bygone line of screen Bondage, dating back to the nonpareil Sean Connery and the rudely retired Pierce Brosnan, Craig comes up short (literally) of even George Lazenby, the Aussie actor who had only one assignment, 1969's On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The spy who gagged me, Craig is to Connery what Mini-Me is to Austin Powers' Dr. Evil.

Gambling on Craig to carry on their billion-dollar franchise, producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli chose author Ian Fleming's first entry in the phenomenally resilient Bond series. Fleming's über secret agent was a cultural product of the Cold War (and British end-of-empire blues), but the fall of the Berlin Wall has only meant that Bond's "license to kill" was upgraded to include renegade Commies, terrorists, mad media moguls and other high-value targets.

Casino Royale deals out a losing hand, starting with the astounding absence of Monty Norman's killer theme music in the opening credits. The screenwriters (including Oscar-winner Paul Haggis) pay lip service to Fleming's 1954 book, but they've modernized it by playing to U.S. audiences in the age of ESPN, not the USSR. Most of the book involves Bond's cryptic game of high-stakes baccarat. Now 007 must go mano a mano with his foe in a made-for-TV game of Texas hold 'em poker. Yee-haw, pardner.

Yet director Martin Campbell's introduction of Bond is neither as card shark nor suave, karate-chopping spy. In a set-piece befitting Jackie Chan, not Jimmy Bond, Craig acrobatically chases an anonymous bad guy through the Ugandan jungle and up and down a construction crane. Surly and jut-jawed, Craig is not a kinder and gentler Bond. According to his exasperated and expendable boss, M (Judi Dench), he's just a blunt instrument.

It's no coincidence that Bond visits a Miami "Body Worlds" exhibit as a prelude to another no-brain chase. Craig's freakish, barrel-chested physique sculpts the new Bond as a Y2K caveman of few words. Craig doesn't even get to say, "My name is Bond, James Bond." This guy would be more comfortable ordering steroids, shaken not stirred, instead of a martini.

Bond's penultimate showdown takes place at a casino in Eastern Europe, where he faces down Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelson), a tycoon of terrorism whose evildoing is signified by his bleeding eyeball. Reluctantly bonding with Bond is a dishy British treasury agent (Eva Green) who's supplying the stakes for 007 to play.

Everything is in on the table in Casino Royale's royally dull denouement, from torture and betrayal and death in Venice to Bond's handy pocket defibrillator that could bring him back to life. Campbell and the film's gambling producers shouldn't have bothered. This 007 is DOA, though odds are he'll return to die another day.

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First published in Boulder Weekly, 11/22/06