The Batman (2022)

 "It's all connected."

While the later films didn't quite manage to maintain the excellence, one would perhaps naturally assume that Christopher Nolan had perfected the Batman film back in 2005 with Batman Begins. Yet it would seem not. We have a new contender.

So why is this film so good? Wisely, it skips the origin story and, notably, focuses on a very realistic portrayal of Gotham, with zero supernatural or sci-fi elements. The film is superbly and stylistically shot. Robert Pattinson is perfect as Bruce Wayne, while Zoe Kravitz and Jeffrey Wright also excel.

The use of villains is also excellent. This is a brilliant way of using the Riddler, while Penguin is toned down to become a mere mob boss, no doubt to appear again. The character of Selina Kyle is very well written indeed.

Yet this is at root a crime film very much reminiscent of the Saw franchise and not only in its visual style. Not necessarily in terms of the tiresomely excessive gore but the elements of those films that were actually good- the dark, almost hopeless feeling that violent, corruption and despair are ever-present, and the complex, multi-layered mystery, something which works supremely well here and makes everything feel very fresh indeed.

Yet what works even better is the way the Riddler is reinvented in the vein of Jigsaw, as a crusader for truth. Even better, there's a thread of Gotham having dark secrets in its past, which is used to comment wryly on the extremely harmful conspiracy theory online culture that exists today. It makes the point, rightly, that conspiracy theories are not mere harmless fun.

I hope this film is the first of several. It certainly seems to be setting things up for the future. Overall, though, this film is a triumph..

Tenet (2020)

 "We are being attacked from the future."

This is one of those Christopher Nolan films that are a massive puzzle box, like Inception and The Prestige, if not quite as good as those two. How much you enjoy these types of film depends on whetheryou like a film to be a puzzle box, in this case a big timey-wimey palindrome thingy. 

Confession time: yes, I understood the broad nature of the plot, but I immediately went on to watch a YouTube video to so I understood it... well, "fully" is an awfully strong word. Again, there will be those who, understandably,don't fancy the idea of a fil that takes effort, and even multiple viewings,to work out what's going on,especially if said film happens to be two and a half hours long.

It's worty it, though. This film is extraordinary, and it's a shame how a certain spiky virus sort of sabotaged it at the box office, although admittedly that's hardly the worst of the many sins of said virus.

The central concept is fantastic- inversion of entropy, meaning that an object or person can be "inverted", moving backwards through time instead of forwards. Hence, there's a lot of time travel in this film, but you have to live through events in real time, whether forwards or backwards. There are great concepts arising from this, such as the "temporal pincer movement" and the rather clever little time paradoxes around the characters, and particularly around the true nature of John David Washington's Protagonist. The fact he's known only as that is a clue.

It's not all that, of course. There's humour. There's Kenneth Branagh being superb as an evil (is there any other kind?) Russian oligarch. There's a chilling yet tasteful exploration of domestic abuse. There's a delightful cameo from old Michael Caine. This film is a joy.

Maps to the Stars (2014)

“She’s a Scientologist.”

“I was thinking of converting. Kind of a career move.”

I know I've blogged a lot of Cronenberg fils lately, but he fascinates me. He's known for his body horror, but his work (especially in recent decades) is so much more than that- philosophical, dreamlike, with clear themes but a very adult ambiguity of meaning. So here's another.

This film is, of course, a blatant denunciation, from far to the north, of Hollywood and it's vacuous culture where everyone is an aspiring actor/writer/second gaffer. And Hollywood royalty is as horrible and exploitative as anything in the Ancien Regime- arrogant, entitled, obsessed with new age mumbo jumbo, and full of nasty casual prejudices beneath the surface liberalism. They are empty leeches who both feed off and discard ordinary people, from whose lives they are so very far removed. Havana (an excellent Julianne Moore) is as much a monster as anyone in the creepily incstuous and cursed Weiss family, and the relationship between her and Agatha is, I suppose, the fairly straightforward thematic core of the film.

But we also have the weird, incestuous and similarly loathsome Weiss family, seen being generally empty and horrible until prodgal daughter Agatha returns to "make amends". The plot unfolds at the perfect pace as the full, repetitive, abusive horror of the family's curse slowly unwinds. This is, I think, a film that will reward repetitive viewings. While critics are, I know, divided on ths, still Cronenberg's latest, I personally find it utterly compelling.

Cosmopolis (2012)

"Talent is more erotic when it's wasted."

I haven't read the original Don DeLillo novel, or indeed anything by him: bad English graduate! But as a script it's superb, fizzling with ideas of Great American Novel standard. And on top of this we get the inspired, stylised directing style of the truly great David Cronenberg. Not all his fans will agree- this is significantly artier date than his better-known work- but it's among his best.

The ideas are superb. Eric Packer is a twenty-eight year old finance billionaire, and he's profoundly alienated from his world. But this alienation isn't existential angst, not even when he murders his own security guard on a whim in a presumed reference to The Outsider. No, this is something much more modern, alienation caused by the deeply abstract, chaotic randomness of our financial system. None of us understand it, but all of us gamble on it in some way and it has the power to wreck our society with crashes and economic storms. And none of it is real, not any more. Not even money is real: most money in the world is just IOU's written by banks, and if it was all called in then the system would collapse. It's absurd, but not in an old-fashioned existentialist sense. It's post-modern capitalism, heady and dangerous, and Eric employs a "head of theory" to pontificate about it. This is a world where financial markets can be thrust into uncertainty by the interpretation of a pause in the speech of the Chinese finance minister.

Eric, over the course of a day, seems to engineer his own self-destruction- casually ending his marriage by blatant infidelity, gambling his fortune on a Quixotic gesture against the yuan and, finally, seeking death. Only there can be find reality.

The visuals of the film complement the themes superbly: most of it is set in cars, and Cronenberg lingers over their erotic visual power in ways that remind me of Crash. The effect is claustrophobic: Eric is limited in where he can go by the chaos (that theme again) of the New York traffic as the president visits, and we see this with the narrow spaces in which he spends the film.

I'm not a fan of Robert Pattinson but he's superb here. And Paul Giamatti is outstanding. But isn't he always?

This is a brilliant film, one packed with far more meaning than I've been able to tease out, and a thing of true beauty. It is also, incidentally, notable for its positive portrayal of Muslims. A superb film.

Remember Me (2010)

"What if I die eating my vindaloo?"

This drama, ironically half-forgotten, might be best known for starring Robert "Twilight" Pattinson in a proper film. And its theme- that we could all get run over by a bus tomorrow so, like, carpe diem and that- may be a bit of a truism with a "shock" ending which seems less and less clever with the benefit of hindsight. But this is actually a pretty good drama, well written and acted, and not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

Death is ever present. We begin as Tyler's family gather round his late mother's grave, ten years after her meaningless death and, and we establish Tyler's fraught relationship with his stuffed shirt of a father, Charles, played against type by Pierce Brosnan. The film charts his romantic ups and downs with Ally, his death-obsessed on-again off-again girlfriend, his brother's recent suicide, the bullying of his sister Caroline and the comparison with his less angst-ridden friend, Aidan.

The film is full of signifiers. The opening scenes around the grave are grainy, full of muted colours and Tyler smokes, a sure sign of youthful rebellion, at least in 2001. (He's 21 but, this being the USA, he's only just started drinking, which seems bizarre to us decadent Europeans.) 

His relationship with Ally is complicated by his getting off on the wrong foot with her police officer father, but the central theme is their date in an Indian restaurant (are they a thing in America, where is always thought Mexican food filled the same cultural space?), and her ideas of living for today. This means more than she imagined to Tyler, whose brother committed suicide following the same pressure from Charles to put the family business before music that Tyler is now feeling.

Things come to a crisis after Alyssa dumps Tyler, he clashes with his dad over his neglect of Caroline and, finally, the poor girl is horribly bullied. But Tyler's furious reaction this eventually leads to a rapprochement of sorts with his dad. It's a straightforward sounding plot but the script does a very good job of developing the characters.

I know the ending, with Tyler in the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, has been criticised on grounds of taste, but I'd say this sort of reaction was somewhat kneejerk; it works in the context of the film, although it doesn't exactly achieve the pathos intended. This isn't a classic of cinematic drama by any means, but it's a good script performed well. It's well worth seeing.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 (2012)

"I remember how to undress myself."

"Yeah, but I do it so much better."

It's been a while, but it's time I finished off everyone's favourite vampires-and-fundamentalist-Christian-sexual-morality franchise. Fortunately, this time there's more of the former and less of the latter, as our two main protagonists are now married and all that, but we still have a lack of charisma or sexual chemistry from both of our leads which continues to bedevil these films.

We begin as Bella awakes and gets very maternally protective about her ridiculously named baby daughter, insisting that Jacob, imprinting or no imprinting, stays away. She spends some months acclimatising both to her new family and her new life as a vampire. Oh, and she gets to have sex. Because apparently it's moral, and in no way completely failing to take the relationship seriously, to refrain from sex before marriage. After all, it's not as though the pill has been around for fifty years or anything.

Still, after a few months of undead Mormonism there are stirrings of an actual plot stirring, even if this plot amounts to "the Volturi mistakenly believe that baby Renesmee is one of these nasty immortal children, and want to kill both her and the family without bothering to check first." This is very silly, but admittedly we do get a superficially exciting film to watch.

Bella is now strong, unable to tire, able to have vigorous sex but tempted by human blood, which is probably some sort of metaphor for sin or something. Thing is, though, I lie her even less than before. She and her new family are so haughty and superior, her new husband remains a wanker as always, and unforgivably she plans to cut all ties from Charlie, her father, who gave so much for her. Notably it is Jacob, and not her or one of her in-laws, who  stops this happening. But things are still not explained to Charlie, who does not "need to know" about his own family. This leaves a really bad taste in the mouth. So does the sense of Carlisle's vampire family as being elite and super-rich, part of the 1%. I note that Bella and Edward are just given a house by the family, many of whom do not seem to have to work for a living.

There are good things about his film: Michael Sheen is a great baddie, for example. But is it me who is a little perturbed that the baddies are all decadent Europeans with British accents, while our heroes are all wholesome, Fox News watching, Republican voting New World types, including a veteran of the American War of Independence to hammer home the point? The reads like a defence of Christian American family values against those evil liberal Europeans who threaten those family values. I'm on the Volturi's side. Go Aro.

The end is a nice bit of deception, I suppose, with lots of people dung in what turns out to be a dream sequence shown by Alice to Aro. Everyone agrees to be friends and there's a bit more romantic blah between Bella and Edward. Uuuurgh. I'm glad the Twiglet films are over now.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011)

“I won’t kill you. That’d be too easy. You deserve to live with this.”

Don’t expect the next review to be Part 2: I’ll get round to that when I see it. No spoilers please.

The film begins with a lot of wedding stuff, and feels like one of those comic books where one of the protagonists gets married: light, fluffy and full of crap humour. It’s all extremely well shot, though, with some extraordinary touches. There’s some nice switching between monochrome and colour, and the dream sequence with the rose petals looks extraordinary. Still, Bella is marrying Edward, and I’m bloody worried about her. A potential lifetime of abuse awaits.

Alarm bells start sounding very soon; Bella is not to become a vampire until after the honeymoon. Sex is dangerous, so anything before this happens could kill her. And it’s not as though they’re not going to have sex on their honeymoon, however much Edward tries to arrange their time to avoid it. I don’t care how uber-cool their honeymoon suite is: this is a stupid situation which the characters just seem to walk into. Surprise surprise, Bella becomes pregnant: I assume vampires don’t do contraception as it cramps their style. Surprise surprise: the child is not exactly all human, and could kill her. Edward is personally responsible for all of this easily avoided near-tragedy. How on Earth are we, the audience, supposed not to hate the bastard?

And what are we supposed to conclude/ That all sex, even good Christian married sex, is bad, dangerous and to be avoided? That is NOT a good message. And, yes, the issue of abortion rears its head. These films are getting more and more right-wing.

The ending is tiresomely predictable: Bella gives birth, “dies” and, to no one’s surprise, is about to become a vampire in the last shot. And I don’t like all this stuff about Jake imprinting on the baby either: essentially this is just taking a character who disagrees with the authorial viewpoint and making him conform. It’s crude and nasty.

I have to emphasise, though, that although I really, really hate the subtext of these films, they’re increasingly well made as they progress. His film looks gorgeous, and even the CGI for the wolves looks good. It’s just a shame that the central message is so wrong and dangerous.

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

“I’m tired of this. From now on I’m Switzerland, ok?”

This film is much like its predecessor; better written, shot and acted than the first, but based around a disturbing and dangerous piece of socially conservative ideology, namely the whole “no sex before marriage thing”, which is a reckless and immoral thing to tell the young girls at whom this series of films is aimed.

The early scenes include a lot of talk about marriage, including a line where Bella describes it as an “institution”. Let’s make on thing clear; it is no such thing. A marriage is a declaration of love and commitment between people, whether gay or straight. It’s private. It should NOT be an “institution”, regulated by the state. It’s usually those on the right who want to privatise things, but I say we should privatise marriage. The state has no right to impose itself on something so private. I hate it when right-wing politicians talk about stuff like tax breaks for married couples; this is Stalinist social engineering.

Don’t worry: I’m off my soapbox now. I still hate that controlling wanker Edward though. Yay for Charlie and his much-needed offer of pepper spray! This film essentially picks up most of the pre-existing plot threads and puts them in the context of Bella’s high school graduation. Edward’s behaviour towards Bella looks more and more disturbingly controlling (NOT kinky, whatever Fifty Shades of Grey may have been based on: this is just straightforward emotional manipulation shading into abuse). As Jacob rightly says, he lies to her. It’s looking depressingly certain that Bella is doomed to fall under Edward’s creepy spell, though. Jake is jealous, but the whole force of the narrative is against him. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t have a massive fight for the position of alpha male, but there can only be one winner.

I really don’t like the scene in which Edward warns Bella that sex with him would be a dangerous, violent thing. The subtext is that sex is scary, bad, and to be avoided except for the strict purpose of begetting children from within wedlock. Bollocks. Nor do I like Rosalie- she dreamed of the sort of life that social conservatives approve of for women until becoming a vampire (for which read pre-marital sex) ruined her life forever. This is dangerous stuff. Stephenie Meyer may seem cool, and put Muse in every one of the movies somewhere, but the ideology she’s peddling is deeply, deeply dangerous.

Bella explicitly declares herself to be a virgin. Edward declares himself to be “old school”. Patriarchy, much? I may be burdened with a Y chromosome, but the Twilight films are really, really awakening my inner feminist. Sadly, though, we end with their wedding being arranged. This is NOT a happy ending.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009)

“You can’t trust vampires. Trust me.”

Well, this is much better. Still narrowing my eyes somewhat at the socially conservative subtext, but this film has drama in it, and tension, and actual stuff happening, which makes for a much better viewing experience. Also, the direction is better. And there’s none of that horrible, dull, washed out picture quality that still plagued the first film. All that said, Bella is still as wet as the English Channel and I still reckon Edward is a right bastard, which I suspect is not the effect intended.

Still, this is much better. I like the way that both vampires and werewolves (on which the spotlight now falls) are explained in terms of Native American mythology, which adds a nice bit of cultural tension, although I’m in no position to judge the way that the culture has been depicted. We have a love triangle set up, with Bella torn between Jacob (whom I like) and Edward (whom I don’t). Jacob is cool, a nice guy, and interested in Bella for who she is, while Edward is none of those things as he’s far too busy brooding over things like how he envies those who have the option of suicide. Lovely.

There’s some cool vampirey stuff, though. I love the concept of the Volturi- arrogant, legalistic, cultured Italian vampires. The scene where Bella gets a paper cut and tempts Jasper to go after her blood may be the biggest vampire cliché ever, but it’s fun. But there are some strong religious overtones: Carlisle, for example, wants to be goof “even if I’m damned regardless”. There are theological overtones to the whole concept of vampirism as depicted here. The vampires believe that their very state condemns them to Hell, literally, because of what they are, and this is why Edward doesn’t want to make Bella into a vampire.

If we look at this through the prism of this being a metaphor for sex, though, it becomes disturbing. Are we being told that those of us who have committed fornication are doomed to go to Hell? Is Stephenie Meyer one of those right-wing Christians from red state America who confuses morality with consensual sex? I’m no Christian, but  seem to recall that Jesus spent an awful lot of time talking about the evils of poverty and that his main comment on sex was to refuse to condemn some prostitutes. Just saying.

Anyway, Edward, being a broody, selfish twat, dumps Bella. Good for her. His entire vampire family have to bugger off and adopt new identities as, being ageless, they can arouse suspicion by stating in one place too long. Certain questions arise from this, though: for example, how can Carlisle get a social security number so he can practise as a doctor? How does the whole bureaucracy thing work? Probably best not to think too hard about such things.

Jacob spends a lot of time topless once he joins the pack, which my girlfriend rather likes for some reason. He’s a nice guy, with hinterland but none of Edward’s Byronic arsedness. The wolf pack consists of some rather bad CGI, unfortunately, b ut this bit is rather good drama. They’re basically good guys, but with the potential to lash out in rage and, as the character of Emily rather literally shows us, this is a rather clunky metaphor for men and their capacity for sudden domestic violence.

Bella has essentially been dumped by both Edward and Jacob by the end of the film, so she becomes an adrenaline junkie, as you do. At one point it looks as though Edward may bugger off to Italy and commit suicide, but Bella eventually stops him. Meh. It would have been cool if he’d died, stupidly, just like Romeo, by committing suicide in Italy because he mistakenly thought his lover was dead but, sadly, it’s not to be. And yes, the various Romeo and Juliet references throughout the film are not exactly subtle.

The ending I don’t like at all: Bella has to wait until graduation before Edward makes her a vampire (i.e. takes her virginity). And he has a precondition: she has to marry him first. I REALLY don’t like what’s being said here. Kids, if you’re reading this, do NOT marry anyone before you know whether you’re sexually compatible with them first, because sex is really, really, emotionally important. It’s a central, bonding thing to any relationship. Marriage before sex is stupid, reckless and immoral.

Still, that was much better than the first film.

Twilight (2008)

“You’re my own personal brand of heroin.”

Aha! Bet you didn’t expect me to start reviewing the Twiglet saga, did you? Let’s face it; I’m a thirty-five year old man- not exactly the target audience. The chances of my ever reading the novels are vanishingly low. All the same, though, I’m curious about the recent trend in popular culture for vampires to be portrayed as sexy, evil yet redeemable bad boys in an interesting takeover of a previously male-dominated genre by female authors writing for a female audience. The sexual subtext was always there, of course- it’s certainly there in Dracula- but these days we have whole subsections in bookshops called “Gothic Romance”. That’s an interesting cultural shift, and certainly not something I’m going to knock. More catering to female tastes, and more female writers, are a good thing generally, and much needed. Consider just how male-dominated is script writing in general.

All the same, though, I’ve heard some potentially troubling things about Stephanie Meyer; her books are said to promote the dangerous and irresponsible idea of refraining from sex before marriage. If true, this is a disgrace. We should not be telling young people that relationships matter so little that you needn’t bother to find out if you’re sexually compatible with someone before marrying them. Yes, once upon a time it may have been impossible to do this without risking pregnancy, but not these days. Decent contraception exists. And regarding contraception, incidentally, there are two sorts of people: those who support sex education in schools and those who support teenage pregnancy. Social conservatism is NOT entitled to any sort of moral high ground: it is profoundly damaging, misogynistic and immoral.

Er, yes. So what about the actual film? Well, for a start, it’s not very well directed. The look of the film, in particular, is ill-judged, with muted colours and a very washed-out look simply giving the film an appearance of dullness. The performances are generally a bit blah and, given that the same actors give much better performances in the later films (yes, I’m a bit behind in my blogging), it’s also tempting to ascribe that to poor notes from the director.

Otherwise, though, there’s much to like. I love the awkwardness of Bella’s relationship with her decent but awkward father, and the refreshingly nuanced and n on-clichéd description of American high school life. Bella’s likeable enough, I suppose, although a bit more quirkiness of personality would have been nice. The problem, though, is that I can’t stand Edward. He’s arrogant, creepy (spying on someone, while they’re sleeping, in their bedroom, is psychopathic and stalkery behaviour), and entirely devoid of charm, humour, or personality. I’m well aware that Fifty Shades of Grey derived from Twiglet fanfic, and that Grey is supposed to be based on Edward, but I don’t see anything kinky about Edward- where’s the playfulness, the sexual imagination, the excitement? My reading of the character is that he’s dangerous, self-obsessed and narcissistic. I simply cannot invest in the idea that the female lead should become romantically involved with the male lead. That’s a fairly big problem.

Jacob, on the other hand, is a much nicer guy, but let’s save him for later films. Edward’s family are cool, too, especially Alice. But these are secondary characters. The film suffers hugely from its lack of a sympathetic male protagonist, the long, dull, pieces of exposition, and the lack of wit or humour of any kinds. The scenes with baddie vampires, in particular, just make me pine for the witty scripting of Joss Whedon, who wrote vampires much, much better.

(Incidentally, sorry about the lack of recent posts on Buffy and Angel. Fact is, since I’ve moved in with my lovely girlfriend I’d rather spend time with her, and that means watching things together. It would be silly to just ask her to start watching Buffy and Angel from some random point mid-season. Don’t worry, though: things have slowed down, not stopped. I’ll plough on, but expect only occasional posts.)

The vampire backstory is a bit straightforward and, well, insipid (vampire “vegetarians”?), but that’s fine- this is primarily a romance. But the dodgy subtext I’d heard about seems to rear its ugly head near the end: Edward doesn’t want to make Bella into a vampire in what feels suspiciously like a metaphor for extra-marital sex. I’ll be watching the subsequent films with narrowed eyes.