Broadcast News (James L. Brooks, 1987)

None of James L. Brooks' films condense his sitcom sensibilities better than Broadcast News. Where so many of his movies feel treacly and thin, Broadcast News offers a well-rounded portrait of fully realized characters whose story does not overstay its welcome. That's the other thing: were it any longer, or were it a television series instead of a one-off movie, the archetypes Holly Hunter, William Hurt and Albert Brooks embody might have consumed them and left only two-dimensional cut-outs for easy humor that turned stale in short order. Somehow, Brooks positions the film perfectly in the middle, clearly drawing upon his television outlook but making something uniquely filmic out of the material.

Using his stint as an CBS News writer as the basis for the film, Brooks casts a spotlight on the news industry in flux. Television has become the dominant means of news communication, and Brooks looks into the medium shortly before the likes of CNN completely altered the format from individual news programs to a 24-hour machine. At times, though, one can hardly tell that the characters only produce news for an hour-long (if that) block of programming, as the Washington newsroom bustles at all times with people desperately trying to get segments finished on-time and watching playbacks with fervent hope that the lead anchor up in New York, a godly presence appropriately played by Jack Nicholson, will give even the slightest indication of approval.

1989 Rewind: Batman

Perhaps it's fate that I've always loved Batman. Growing up, I never read comics but I watched this movie religiously, tuned in for the legendary Batman: The Animated Series whenever it was on, and my bedroom was decorated with all things Batman: Batman wallpaper, Batman bedspreads, Batman toys. And I was born only a few weeks after Batman premiered, so I like to think that the ubiquitous advertising imprinted my fetal brain. In fact, considering how my mom always waits two weeks to see every new film anyway, I'm convinced that I was so excited to see the film for myself that, soon after she left the theater, I decided it was time. And then the stork came to deliver me because that's the only way this theory can be more absurd.

Regardless, Batman is likely the single biggest icon of my youth, which makes it all the stranger that I have not revisited this film in, oh dear, nearly six years. I hadn't sat down with it since before Batman Begins came out, so I spent a good 10 minutes in the store holding the Blu-Ray in my hands wondering if I should shell out the cash. How would Burton's film stack up now that the frame of reference included Christopher Nolan's superb installments and not just Joel Schumacher's travesties? I finally caved and timidly loaded the disc into my player.

To my great surprise, Batman holds up, albeit in ways I could have never expected. As a Batman film, it's almost laughable: it retcons the backstories of both Batman and the Joker to entwine their fates at the expense of any plausibility. The Joker's backstory as a whole grates; clearly Burton, openly averse to comics, based it on the backstory given in Alan Moore's seminal book The Killing Joke, but what he and writer Sam Hamm failed to take into account is that the book openly reveals that past to be a figment of the Joker's mad imagination, and he's a character who should never be explained. Hamm pleads innocent, however, to the Joker being tied into the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents and cites a writers' strike for him not being able to stop this nonsense from happening.

Batman also suffers from some weak supporting characters. Kim Basinger works well within an extremely narrow range, but Meryl Streep couldn't have given Vicki Vale enough of a personality to hang a hat on. Women have long been fabricated in Batman movies expressly to provide a love interest to a man who is too absorbed in his own pathos to ever hold down a steady relationship -- not even Nolan handled this aspect well, though at least he found a way to make Rachel important to the story -- but Vale just sucks the life out of scenes. Even worse is Robert Wuhl's Knox, a snobbish reporter who smacks of the clinging third wheel Albert Brooks played to Cybill Shepherd in Taxi Driver, only not nearly as funny.

Nonetheless, the film succeeds, and it succeeds brilliantly. Not as a Batman or even a comic book movie, mind you, but as a demented slice of neo-noir. Burton's Gotham City is neither a realistic city nor a comic book city; instead, it is a glorious hybrid of German expressionism, Gothic architecture and Art Deco. As with Taxi Driver, colored steam hisses out of vents and manholes at all times, the streets are wet with fetid, stagnant water and the city as a whole almost feels like a criminal.

Michael Keaton's casting caused a great deal of controversy at the time, but he proves to be a great Batman, the best of the entire series, in fact. He can alter his voice and body language between Bruce Wayne and the Bat without lapsing into death metal growls (sorry, Christian), and this comedic actor brings serious intimidation to the part. He's such a natural in the role that he almost overcomes the complete lack of writing on the Bruce Wayne side of the character. The film's chief flaw, Bruce isn't so much mild-mannered as downright milquetoast.

I'd wager that's because Burton put all of his energy into capturing the Joker. He never nails down what makes the character so interesting -- that he reflects the sort of person Batman has to struggle daily to prevent himself from being -- and the closest he comes is a simplistic equation of the two as "freaks." But Jack Nicholson is the reason remember the film: of all the roles in which Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson, none benefits as much as the Joker. A synecdoche of the film proper, he straddles the line between the campy, over-the-top nature of the old serial (which bears more similarities to the film than any of the makers would care to admit) and a more serious tone that Burton and everyone else involved with the project. While I find Keaton's performance far more of a revelation than Nicholson's, his Joker leaps off the screen with his gleeful, prankster insanity.

Burton obviously designed the film around his set pieces, but that makes for a visually resplendent noir, one that you can't help but love. Audiences in 1989 certainly did, as Batman was the biggest phenomenon ever, even bigger than Star Wars. Where movies like Star Wars or The Exorcist became mass hits through word of mouth and saturation booking, Batman became the first film to make a spectacle out of the marketing itself. A retrospective documentary of the entire first run of Batman films, broken up over the four movies, discusses the marketing, and images of fans buying merchandise months before release, of vandals stealing posters from bus stops and entire walls plastered with that simple, effective logo are staggering.

I wasn't there -- well, I guess I kind of was, but it's impossible to fondly recollect fetal memories -- but Batman is as much a nostalgic experience for me as it must be for all those who worked themselves into a frenzy for this movie. As such, perhaps my opinion is weighted by fond remembrances of my childhood. I do see the flaws, however, and they are glaring. I simply don't think they detract enough from the experience of walking through Tim Burton's world. It's actually better than I remember, because now I don't feel the need to hold it to rigid continuity (as if comic books only follow one set timeline anyway). While Basinger and Wuhl take away from the film, the two leads as well as strong actors such as Michael Gough, Pat Hingle, William Hootkins and Jack Palance keep you paying attention to them, which is impressive considering how tempting it is to simply sit back and admire the sets. Not even Prince's dated, ill-fitting soundtrack ruins it thanks to it playing second fiddle to Danny Elfman's excellent score (and that theme...oh, that theme). While it's nowhere near the best of 1989 I've seen, it remains a personal favorite and a film I'd care to re-watch just as many times as I would Nolan's franchise.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a curious case: in the director's repertoire of masterpieces, classics and just plain good movies, it ranks, narratively and structurally, as one of his weakest. Yet it is also one of his most vibrant and engaging, to the point that I find myself itching to revisit it more than any of his top-tier films, and I adore all of them. In condensing parts of all three of the Infernal Affairs trilogy in one film (though the main focus is only upon the first in the series), the movie becomes bloated and spends no time really analyzing its characters, but Scorsese manages to turn it into an epic tragedy that mostly overcomes its glaring flaws.

Normally, Scorsese's films follow a protagonist so closely that we end up viewing the entire narrative through the character's often demented point of view. This time, however, he charts the paths of two characters, which forces Scorsese to take a more objective approach. He watches the two moles, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), with rapt curiosity rather than total empathetic involvement, and it's a testament to his mastery of the craft that his camera work does not suffer at all for this drastic shift in style.

Moving outside New York and the Italian scene -- it would have been redundant after GoodFellas so completely charted the Italian mafia -- The Departed instead looks at Boston crime and the influence of the Irish mafia. "I never wanted to be a product of my environment," explains mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) as images of civil turbulence from the '60s flash before our eyes, "I wanted my environment to be a product of me." Costello has taken over the city's crime after driving out black gangs and Italian mafiosos, and the police can't touch him.

He takes young Colin under his wing, and when the lad gets old enough he enrolls in the Police Academy to set himself up as a mole in the department. Meanwhile, Billy joins the force in an attempt to distance himself from his crime-ridden family, only for Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to recruit him to use those ties to infiltrate Costello's organization. They give Costigan enough jail time to make him look legit, then send him back to his family to let him get to work.

Naturally, a film concerning moles primarily concerns identity. The deeper Billy gets into Costello's racket, the more he slowly comes undone under the pressure. When he angrily demands the cops come and bust Costello for any one of the dozens of felonies he's witnessed, Dignam threatens to simply erase his police file and make him just another gangster, and you can see the desperation in DiCaprio's outraged face. Colin begins to dream of a free life when he enters into a relationship with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), but he's clearly as trapped in Costello's web as Billy. His inability to let people in on his true identity manifests itself when he refuses to let Madolyn display pictures from her childhood when she moves in with him; they only serve to remind him of what he can never have.

There's also a strange paternal bond between Frank and each of the moles. Billy's father and uncle met their demises either directly or indirectly through Costello's actions, and so he places his trust in Bill even when he knows he shouldn't. His relative warmth toward the boy make him more than just the Virgil leading Bill through hell. His bond with Colin is of course even closer, considering he's been nurturing the boy from his adolescence. When Colin contacts Frank, he even calls him Pop so the other cops don't get suspicious.

Scorsese said the film's madcap ending is meant to be a metaphor for the war on terror, which actually makes sense -- surprising, given the over-the-top insanity of the last 20 minutes. The line between cop and criminal disappears in this film when one's identity is muddled, and that could reflect the approval of torture and other atrocities in the name of battling our enemies. The zero-sum bloodbath that closes the film demonstrates that blurring the line to fight the bad guys will destroy us even if we do somehow triumph over the villain.

That final shot, of a rat scurrying across the window, is pathetically obvious, but it's not nearly as bad as some people claim. I've heard people say it ruins the film for them, which baffles me. Still, it shows the cliché in William Monahan's script, which Scorsese successfully underplayed until that moment. Moments like that, combined with the cast's dodgy grasp of the difficult Boston accent and some terrible scenery-chewing from Nicholson, keep The Departed out of the director's upper echelon of work, yet I find myself delighted and completely absorbed by this film.

Where Scorsese's crime dramas are always intimate, tracking one man's ever-unsuccessful attempts to escape the hell of his existence, this dares to be more epic. It brims with the director's signature energy, which was missing in The Aviator and Gangs of New York, though the latter is a better film than this. If nothing else, The Departed demonstrates that, even when working with an under-developed script that reads like a loving Scorsese parody, he can still make something better than most directors could ever hope to craft.

Chinatown

I hereby forgive my film teacher for making me suffer once more through Donnie Darko. The poor man has to show us movies in a room with wired emergency lights that never show off, on a crap little projector, but seeing Chinatown on anything bigger than the tiny-ass T.V. I keep in my apartment gets a pass. I love this film so much I wouldn't mind if we just watched it the entire semester; hell, I love it so much he could have run Donnie Darko again and I wouldn't complain. Too much.

Far and away the greatest of the neo-noirs, Chinatown deserves a place in the cinema hall of fame just because Jack Nicholson plays a character other than Jack Nicholson. While Jack Nicholson the character is certainly a load of fun, it never ceases to amaze me watching his performance here. Nicholson plays Jake Gittes, a private eye in Los Angeles who makes a living outing cheating spouses for paying clients. One day a woman claiming to be Evelyn Mulwray, the wife of the chief engineer of the town's water supply, stops by to hire Gittes, and it launches him into an endlessly tangled web of deceit, corruption, and murder.

Gittes gets evidence of Mulwray's adultery, but the evidence makes it way to press. Gittes winds up in an argument in a barber shop with another patron who insults Gittes' profession. The detective blows up at the man, a banker, and asks who's the real scum, a private eye who uncovers truth, or a banker who forecloses on the poor. It's a bit obvious, but moments like these show screenwriter Robert Towne adding more than just the usual flourish to the proceedings. Then the real Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) shows up and sues Gittes for slander.

Slowly Polanski peels back various, seemingly disconnected elements into a sinister whole: we learn of L.A.'s water drought, yet Jake notices water dumped out of the reservoir as he spies on Mr. Mulwray. Mulwray eventually turns up dead, and Evelyn decides to drop the suit with Gittes, in order to keep a private eye out of her affairs...

Eventually--and without giving too much away though, honestly, it's been 35 years--Gittes uncovers a plot to dry out the San Fernando Valley to bankrupt its farmers, only for some ruthless businessmen to take over and bring the water back, making ludicrous profits. A similar scandal occurred in the city in 1908, and Towne transplants it to 1930s, possibly to comment on how the power elite could still eke out a profit in the Depression. In the end, just about every established character relationship gets turned on its head. I've seen the film three times, but Polanski structures Towne's brilliant script in such a way that I'm still-- well, not surprised, certainly, but still floored by its perfection.

The ending is cynical, borderline nihilistic, but I think it fits both the film and the general path of Polanski's life at that point. Five years earlier, members of Charles Manson's cult brutally murdered his wife Sharon Tate and their unborn child. In grief, Polanski stayed in Europe. Then he came back to make this film and place himself back on top, only to get hit with charges of sex with an underage girl, which led to permanent exile. Polanski had reason enough to be dark what with his wife's death, but history has only made this period darker.

But regardless of his personal flaws, Polanski is a great filmmaker. He got his start with critically acclaimed European thrillers like Knife in the Water and Repulsion, only to score a smash hit in America with Rosemary's Baby, the film that not only established Polanski as a hit-maker but producer Robert Evans as well, a man who would go on to bring this film to light as well as the Godfather films. What I noticed about his direction here is, of course, his use of shadow and lighting (it is a film noir, after all).

Particularly of interest is how Polanski and his cinematographer John A. Alonzo conveyed so much foreboding in Gittes' suits. At the start of the film, Jake wears a white suit, but the more complex the story becomes the darker the suit he sports. Even when Gittes doesn't have time to change they cast Nicholson in such light that his gray suit can look black. Whever Gittes gets closer to the truth, the color lightens. Following this pattern, you can tell Jake is wrong about 20 minutes from the end when he confidently declares he knows the identity of the killer; when he does so, his suit is fully black.

At the start of this I called Chinatown "the best of the neo-noirs," but I have a hard time thinking of it as such. Neo-noir generally works as a broad homage to classic noir; the best certainly work as their own films, but consider Sin City, Blade Runner and the entire filmography of the Coen brothers. All of them draw clear influences--and most downright reference, movies like The Third Man and Double Indemnity. Chinatown, however, works completely as its own film, and I believe it belongs on the list of the classics.

[Note: I just realized I went through this entire piece and never mentioned Jerry Goldsmith's score. It's phenomenal, full of misleading cues that keep you constantly on your toes. It only adds to Polanski's thoroughly Hitchcockian feel.]