“The Dark Knight”

Director: Christopher Nolan 2008
I’ve been avoiding this since it opened worldwide and broke box-office records. As a kid (in the early 60s), I was an avid comic book collector (if I only had them now!). And about 25 years ago, I got interested again and collected contemporary stuff, then quit when so many graphic novels turned nasty, reveling in their excesses. I still visit Comic Relief here in Berkeley, and am a huge fan of Alan Moore’s “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”(just don’t bother with the movie). But super hero films? The special effects seem so much like a video game that I can never suspend belief and accept that Tobey Maguire is really swinging through the canyons of New York.
The other problem is the need by filmmakers to add so much angst and nihilism to the tottering foundation of the material’s comic book provenance. That’s a major problem with “The Dark Knight,” which I finally caught on HBO. Yes, Heath Ledger is excellent. But the rest seems like so much sound and fury—and we know what they signify. The action scenes are so jarringly edited that I was never quite sure what the hell was going on. I get that Batman is a vigilante perhaps as loony as some of his foes. So what? When I was a kid reading Green Lantern, The Flash, The Fantastic Four, Spiderman et al., they were entertaining even when they grew up a little and showed their insecurities. While these movies may dazzle some, they’re not a lot fun.
Maybe the next time I should go to an IMAX theater, aka the eighth circle of hell.

3 X Chabrol

“Les Bonnes Femmes” 1960
“Le Boucher”1970
“Une Affaire de Femmes” 1988
I must have seen Claude Chabrol’s films over the years, yet none comes immediately to mind (that probably says more about my mind than Chabrol’s oeuvre). But in the space of a week, I watched three—and was suitably impressed.
"Les Bonnes Femmes" follows four shop girls, their aspirations, the reality of their rather drab lives. Each, of course, has a different story: Ginette (the sublime Stephane Audran) has a secret, not dark but pleasantly surprising; Rita has a fiancé from a stodgy bourgeois family; Jane’s got a boyfriend in the army—but she happily strays; and Jacqueline has a mysterious admirer whose infatuation borders on stalking. The film seems a bit aimless at times (how the little electronics shop stays in business is perhaps the film’s biggest mystery). But Chabrol draws you into their lives. The ending is unexpected, shocking, sad. Ces’t la vie, Chabrol seems to be saying.
“Le Boucher” enters into Hitchcock territory, then seems to lose interest in the suspense and turns into a psychological study of its main characters. Stephane Audran is back, this time as the attractive head of a grammar school in a lovely village in the Perigord. The local butcher returns after a long stint in the army, including action in Vietnam. Young women are murdered. The butcher loves the teacher—and she may love him in return. But is he the killer? The ending leaves questions, not so much about the butcher as the teacher.
“Une Affaire de Femmes” is based on the true story of the last women guillotined in France. Isabelle Huppert plays Marie, an unhappy wife during the Nazi occupation. She has no money, and her husband is a loser. In a more conventional film, Marie would assist the Resistance, or start a bakery and use the profits to help unfortunates. Marie instead finds a talent for performing abortions. Business thrives, and she expands to renting out space in her apartments to hookers (the apartments grow in tandem with her profits). She cuckolds her husband, who betrays her. She is arrested, sentenced to die after the French legal establishment (all male) decides she must be held up to the country as a woman punished for her sins. Huppert is excellent playing an often unpleasant woman who never thought the blade would fall. But it does.

Back again!

I can't believe I've spent a year neglecting this blog. Is there a good reason? Nope. But I vow to get more reliable. It's not as if I haven't been watching movies and reading books. There's a long list. Below is the newest entry.

"Don’t Look Now”

Director: Nicholas Roeg, 1973
A disturbing movie about an English couple grieving over the drowning death of their young daughter. Laura (Julie Christie) and John (Donald Sutherland) go to Venice to cope with their grief—and for John to work at restoring a church.
Water and religious images abound, as does the color red. Laura meets a pair of sisters, one of whom appears to have second sight. Their daughter is happy in the afterlife. John scoffs at first, then slowly believes he has glimpsed his daughter in the dark, eerie byways of Venice.
“Don’t Look Know” possesses a mesmerizing quality. Christie and Sutherland are believable as a married couple (there’s a famous lovemaking scene). The film is beautifully shot—no surprise since Roeg was an accomplished cinematographer before directing.
Based on a story by Daphne Du Maurier, whose work inspired two Hitchcock movies (“Rebecca,” “The Birds”).
The meaning of “Don’t Look Now” eludes me. Critic David Thomson writes that “in the end what it comes close to meaning is the lure of the death wish that calls itself luck.”
Since I’m not sure what Thomson is driving at, the best I can do to explain the film is this: when someone with second sight advises you to get out of Venice ASAP, you better get out of Venice ASAP.