The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012)

Christopher Nolan's Batman films have seriously, sometimes ponderously, probed the ramifications of superheroes in the "real" world. Batman Begins used its rusted, humid underworld as a petri dish for urban bacteria into which its hero was injected like a test cure. The Dark Knight followed up on the consequences of that hero's success, replacing the low-level scum with a bigger, badder force that wreaked such havoc as a direct result of Batman's presence that one was left to wonder whether his presence made life for the people better or worse. The Dark Knight Rises inverts that thematic dynamic to explore what happens in the hero's absence.

TDKR picks up eight years to the day after the conclusion of The Dark Knight. On the anniversary of Harvey Dent's death, the mayor (Nestor Carbonell) holds a commemoration that flaunts the aggressive clean-up campaign waged in the late district attorney's name, one that has, apparently, rid the city of organized crime. As the mayor, then Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) give their speeches, a shadow watches from above. Not the shadow of a bat, but a man, and a broken one at that, the silhouette of a cane and the bent shadow of the person holding it suggesting not Batman's imposing, fearful, symbolic strength but just a hobbled man. Such has become Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), deteriorated physically from the strain of his days as Batman and mentally from the trauma of losing the friend in whom he believed and the woman he loved. But as another character tells Wayne not too long after, "There's a storm coming," one that will require the man to become a legend once more and handle a greater evil than ever before.

Brian De Palma: The Bonfire of the Vanities

Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.

Steven Spielberg: Amistad

Amistad is the last film in Steven Spielberg's corpus I'm visiting for the first time. Surrounded by the more lauded dramatic achievements of Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, not to mention colored by certain feelings of its preachiness among those who saw it, Spielberg's middle drama of the '90s never appeared on my radar as anything other than a faint blip. But just as I got to see Always through fresh eyes that countered a number of my expectations for that film, so too did Amistad prove far more than the half-forgotten mainstream consensus would have me believe.

In fact, Amistad might well be the most consistent of Spielberg's triumvirate of '90s prestige pictures. It lacks the overwhelming emotional impact of Schindler's List and the visceral power of Saving Private Ryan, but it makes up for these shortcomings by sidestepping the bouts of moral ambiguity and questionable "mainstreamification" of its serious themes. Amistad does have a bit of typical writing in its construction, but by and large it proves a deftly written, fleetingly problematic return to the issue Spielberg did not treat with full sincerity and conviction with The Color Purple: slavery and racism.

Se7en

David Fincher's Se7en remains in the public consciousness after a decade primarily for its climax -- both for its disturbing content and the endless parodies of Brad Pitt's anguished scream "What's in the baaaaahhhhx?! -- yet its influence on nearly all thrillers that would shoot for the adjective "dark" is nearly incalculable. Its grimy, slimy aesthetic informs countless psychological thrillers, and the extremity of the murders depicted set off a chain reaction that led to grisly crime on the ludicrous scale of Saw as well as the more scientific focus of C.S.I. and its spin-offs.

Upon revisiting Fincher's breakthrough, out now in a positively stunning Blu-Ray remaster, what stuck out at me was the surprising amount of emotion. The term "nihilistic" has been attached so often to the feature that even the new Blu-Ray describes it as such in its included booklet. Yet the film's downbeat, bleak ending does not translate to pure fatalism. Deep within the horrifying twists and turns of the film, Se7en ultimately focuses upon the central character, Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman), and his arduous journey out of the very nihilism that both supporters and detractors see in the movie.

The first shot of the film, in fact, occurs away from the hell of Se7en's unnamed city, safe in Somerset's quiet home. Yet Fincher prepares us for the world outside the man's bedroom by watching the old detective ready himself for work. Freeman, an actor who always casts off a calming vibe, lightly smooths the wrinkles from his jacket. Then, he pockets a switchblade. Something outside clearly made this cop feel that a sidearm alone could not protect him, and when we see what it is, Somerset's nihilism seems almost comical in its insufficiency. If anything, the idea that he thinks a knife can hold back the darkness becomes a hopeful gesture.

After viewing an all-too-common "crime of passion" that leaves a husband dead -- "Just look at all that passion on the wall," he sighs -- Somerset heads out to a crime scene that will severely mess up his plans to retire at the end of the week. With his young, cocky replacement, Detective Mills (Brad Pitt), in tow, Somerset enters a fetid, roach-filled home where a mammoth of a man lies dead face-down in a bowl of spaghetti. Everyone jokes that the man ate himself to death, until they notice his hands and feet bound by wire and a bruise on his temple that suggests a gun pressed to his head. They were right: this guy did eat his fat ass to death, but it wasn't because of a lack of self-control.

Somerset knows this kind of crime is too meticulously planned and executed to be a random act, and he practically begs his captain (R. Lee Ermey) to re-assign him so that he doesn't leave in a week haunted by this killer. Sure enough, when a notorious criminal lawyer turns up dead the next day having been bled to death and left with the word "GREED" scrawled on the floor in his blood, it takes no time for Somerset to realize the pattern.

Each of the murders, based of course on the seven deadly sins, is intricate and, with the exception of the last two, gruesome. Yet Fincher displays a surprising amount of restraint in his view of these extreme crimes. His love of deep focus and his wry method of eliding around gratuitous shots allow him to show grisly scenes while still leaving things to the audience's imagination. Consider the manner with which he presents the Lust murder: Somerset and Mills track down a clue to an S&M parlor where they look at a photo of something the parlor owner designed for the killer, cut to an industrial club/brothel and a backroom where a man sits shivering and hyperventilating next to a bed with a dead prostitute we never quite see, then move to two interrogation rooms, one with the obstinate club owner and the other with the terrified patron. As the man explains having a gun put in his mouth as the killer ordered him, we finally see the photo, showing a knife mounted to a codpiece, and we understand in an instant what he did to that hooker without having to look at it.

That refusal to revel in the salaciousness of the material permits Fincher to devote his time to the characters. He never shatters Mills' confidence (not until the end, anyway) but he does dig deeper and suggest that the young man regrets his brash desire to come to the big city to solve more interesting cases, while his wife's (Gwyneth Paltrow's) obvious discontent drives a wedge between the loving couple that never becomes too stereotypical. The interplay between Mills and Somerset plays on the usual dynamic of the young cop and the old, wizened veteran, yet Fincher and writer Andrew Kevin Walker update it for the '90s: when Somerset figures out the pattern of the killings, he heads to the library to research any literary work he can think of that mentions the seven deadly sins. Mills, a member of the attention-deficit generation, has to buy the Cliff's Notes of those books because he can't stand trawling through Milton and Chaucer.

Even the killer, John Doe (Kevin Spacey), is richly defined despite only appearing in the final act. In his best performance, Spacey doesn't overplay his hand and embodies the banality of evil: there is nothing remarkable about John. He spent years slicing his fingers to destroy his prints, but no one would be able to identify him even if he left a print at the crime scene. So thoroughly boring is the man that he not only has to walk into a police precinct to get noticed but scream until people look. The eyes, however, give it away: in John Doe's eyes in the look of a man who cannot stomach the world around him, who's egotism found an outlet in horrific, fundamentalist Christianity. As he leads Mills and Somerset to his most disturbing setup, he spits venomous dismissal of his victims that betrays his self-absorption behind his religious facade.

But the heart of it all is Somerset. His despair is palpable, and unlike the usual retiring cop who looks back on his career with nostalgia and camaraderie, the detective behaves like the soldier in The Thin Red Line who learns he's being shipped home: rather than make a brave show of wanting to stay and help, he can barely contain his relief over his escape. Somerset sports a habit of ticking a metronome every night both to distract him from past horrors and to drown out the sound of street crime just outside. When Tracy, who doesn't know anyone else in the city, confides in him that she's expecting, he can only offer advice by way of relating his own experience with getting a young woman pregnant many years ago and talking her into an abortion to spare a child the nightmare of growing up in this hell.

Try as he might, however, he cannot leave his work behind them. It is Somerset who guesses the motivation for the killings, who does the thorough research and who even submits to being his replacement's inferior just to stay on and see the case through. A brief conversation with the captain uncovers the humanity in them both: the C.O.'s refusal to believe that Somerset can just quit after so many years on the force seems less a proud inability to see the dangers of the job rather than an insight into his own thought process. Implicit in his speech to Somerset is the notion that he, too, once thought of running away from this futile job, but he couldn't leave without feeling guilty about not helping, the same feeling that tugs at Somerset to finish the case and even stay with the police at the end.

Thus, Se7en is a film about humanity regained, not lost, and its grotesquerie comes to match the same level of exaggeration in numerous Christian allegories. The disillusioned priest in Shyamalan's Signs regains his faith after the terrifying ordeal of an alien invasion. Hell, the entire corpus of Flannery O'Connor reintroduces faith through downright catastrophic means. That religion should be the evil to motivate a character to rediscover his humanism is but the wryest and cleverest trick in a film that expresses a routine enthusiasm, never for the particulars of its crimes but in the ingenuity of its execution. This unexpectedly moral ending, which reveals the intelligence of the film, is the perfect book-end for the opening credits, which revel in the balls-to-the-wall, style-breaking aesthetic of the film. For a long time, that Brakhage-influenced opening represented the zenith of the picture, yet I didn't notice how smart the thing was until it was released at its most visually-appealing.

Invictus

Let us not waste time declaring that Clint Eastwood's latest film is "a sports movie that isn't really about sports." No sports movie is really about sports, save for ESPN documentaries: even underdog stories, the most common type of film to involve sports and the one that focuses most heavily on the game in question, use sports to comment upon an individual or team learning dedication and humanity through the game and linking characters to the world through the thrill they get from playing.

Invictus, adapted from John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Changed a Nation by Anthony Peckham, is not only an underdog sports movie but a sports film about national pride and unity, a sort of racially tinged iteration of Miracle. I must confess that I'm never at odds with the critical consensus more than when the new Clint Eastwood movie makes its way into theaters (which is often, since the director, almost an octogenarian, is one of the most prolific mainstream filmmakers working today): even without any formal knowledge of visual compositions, I recognize his formidable skill with a camera, but I find the scripts he turns into movies often cinematically conservative, self-serving awards bait (how funny it is, that the man revered for his iconoclast image is the most Oscar-baiting director of the decade). And while a critic must clear his or her mind of expectations the second the lights come down, I couldn't help but worry that this would be yet another play for gold when I first sat down.

It's an opinion that isn't entirely unjustified. Set in South Africa in the lead-up to the 1995 World Cup, Invictus is often on-the-nose about the racial politics sweeping the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman), and the inspirational music cues are practically retch-inducing. Happily, most of the moments where it does overplay its hand were all placed in the film's trailer, softening their eye-rolling impact. What Eastwood does here, what he's failed to do in his last few ventures, is use his camerawork and his skilled hand at coaching actors into making the larger social statements of Invictus secondary to our emotional response to the story. Unlike, say, Precious, which shamelessly manipulates our emotions and licks its lips over the various trials its characters face, Invictus makes the audience a part of the story by using its technical elements to place us in the crowds of spectators in and out of rugby stadiums, cheering alongside fans and gazing admirably on Mandela in his idealistic political actions. Here is a racial drama that does not invite us to gawk at the stratification between races (though there are revealing shots of the slums that Africans must inhabit in their own country) nor serves as a simple piece of feel-good fluff that always seems to be geared toward narcissistic white people.

The comparison between Mandela, the first black president of a country that broils with racial tensions in the wake of massive social upheaval, and Barack Obama is facile and distracting. Yes, Obama too inherited a financially and socially unstable country and his race, background and well-spoken presentation essentially cemented his iconography before he assumed office, but Eastwood is not a director concerned with politics; when his films make statements, they usually omit the politics for more social concerns -- his most political works of the decade, Changeling and Flags of Our Fathers, are among his weakest.

A better comparison piece to Invictus would be, naturally, Eastwood's last film, Gran Torino, a film I enjoyed albeit for all the wrong reasons, gawking at its false self-confidence like a rubbernecker at the American Idol tryouts. That film also dealt with racism, but it fell into the trap of the typical racial drama by pinning grand societal statements onto a handful of characters who could not shoulder the burden, not least of which because with the exception of Eastwood himself, the acting in that film was downright embarrassing. Invictus isn't the first sports film to deal with race (does anyone remember the Titans?), but it effectively flips the race movie on its head by using the personal stories of Mandela and rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) to feed into a larger social context.

Mandela knows little of rugby, and he even hates Francois' rugby team, the Springboks, a lingering symbol of South Africa' apartheid past -- he mentions to his adviser that, in prison, he and the other inmates use to cheer for any team but the Springboks to irritate the Afrikaner guards -- but he recognizes that whites, most of whom are every bit as indigenous as the Africans at this point, need to retain some symbol of their own past.

Freeman gives one of his finest performances as Mandela; he and Eastwood present the man as an inspirational and earnest idealist, but also a shrewd politician. He understands that hobbies as innocuous as sports link people more than speeches or social legislation, so he decides to, without forcing more black players onto the Springboks or changing their logo or colors, gently reshape the rugby team into the symbol of the Rainbow Nation. In his conversations with others, he can guide them into positions of inferiority, such as when he meets Francois and has the rugby captain sit facing the sun. Freeman's a naturally charismatic actor, but he imbues Mandela's cult of personality with incredible aplomb; however idealized this portrait may be, you believe that this man emerged from a 30-year prison sentence ready to forgive and lead. Eastwood and Peckham temper this mythic image with descriptions of his troubled personal life that are perhaps too forward where Freeman's acting and Eastwood's visuals could have communicated them without words, but these humanizing bits also help us understand why he might be so eager to think of the entire country as his family, Christlike behavior that it is.

Along with Quentin Tarantino and David Cronenberg, Eastwood is America's foremost cinematic moralist, even if all three of them are practitioners of occasionally extreme violence. As a moralist, he is neither as incisive and intuitive as Cronenberg nor as viscerally entertaining as Tarantino, but he trumps the both of them in his ability to make the characters emotions are own. At his best, such as Letters From Iwo Jima, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven and the parts of Million Dollar Baby that didn't slip into mawkishness, Eastwood makes his characters' pain and doubts our own. His sound crew, headed by long-time Eastwood collaborators Bud Asman and Alan Robert Murray, creates perhaps the most immersive crowd ambiance I've ever heard, perfectly capturing the overwhelming roar of a packed stadium and perfectly complementing Eastwood's exciting direction on the rugby field. We are mercifully spared the fine details of rugby save for a basic lesson about passing and a description of the World Cup bracket, and part of the fun of the time Eastwood spends on the green is figuring out the game as the film progresses (it's really not hard to pick up the basics). Off the field, he gives us fascinating glimpses not merely into Mandela's life but Pienaar's; Damon must recite some of the film's more questionable dialogue, the sort of platitudes that no rugby captain should be making, but Eastwood does such a fine job of presenting Francois as an intelligent, considerate person and Damon buries the loftier aspects of the prose in plain-spoken terms that allow us to root for the Springboks without feeling morally obligated to champion them simply for what they symbolize.

The first hour's pacing can be leaden at times, and, as usual, digital effects are the director's Achilles' heel, but Invictus stands as one of Eastwood's finest works of the decade, appealing even to this skeptic. His camerawork here is as gorgeous as ever and none too sly in places: at the start of the film, Mandela's bodyguard requests more men to protect the president, only for a handful of white officials to show up and report for duty. Eastwood places the black, inexperienced bodyguards on the more dominant right, but they look bewildered and somewhat frightened by the Afrikaners on the left, whose professional stoicism belies an equal confusion and discomfort. This shot, and others like it, don't play up racism for murky laughs as did the racial tension in Gran Torino, and it shows the director's gift for subtlety even in a comic situation.

Sorting through the various genres and storylines of Eastwood's directed filmography reveals a few noteworthy parallels (such as his odd fascination with abusive and ruined childhoods), but the primary link between his best works is his affinity for deconstruction. Unforgiven and Gran Torino sought to re-evaluate his iconic Man With No Name and Dirty Harry images, respectively; Flags of Our Fathers is about the deconstruction of a single photograph. Even when his films do not succeed entirely -- and I'm afraid I'd argue that most of his films these past ten years have not -- Eastwood has a remarkable ability to, in contrast to Tarantino and Cronenberg, delve so deep into his characters that he can lose himself in considering their motivations instead of making their statements through the action. Invictus, for all its flaws, shows him doing what he somehow managed to pull off in Letters From Iwo Jima: spending the time to learn about these characters even as monumental events happen all around them. When Mandela sends the Springboks to the black areas of the city with TV cameras, Eastwood comments upon all the other feel-good race movies out there: as Mandela views the footage of the Afrikaners jovially teaching fundamentals to the poor black youths who used to hate them, we might as well be watching the director's monitor while filming any number of Oscar-bait pictures. Eastwood, through Mandela, knows that such an oversimplified image can still win over large swaths of people who don't feel like looking any deeper, and this subtle jab at the film's primary audience proves that the old man's still got some fire in him.

Johnny Handsome

Walter Hill's Johnny Handsome has so much going for it that I just can't fault it when it trips ten feet from the finish line and wretchedly crawls across the finish line. It's both his and Mickey Rourke's last film of the 80s, and a sort of last gasp for the both of them, though Rourke finally climbed back on top with Sin City and of course The Wrestler. Rourke alone should alert you to the necessity to watch this film regardless of its overall quality, as the man quite simply walked away with the 80s as far as I'm concerned.

Rourke stars as the titular character (née Johnny Sedley), a small-time career criminal who ends up on the bad side of a botched heist and spends the rest of the film plotting his revenge against the people who sold him out. He got his nickname due to the horrible facial disfigurement he's suffered since birth, scars that both swell his head and force him to speak with a lisp. Later in the film, Johnny recounts how, as a child, a young boy ripped off his jack-o-lantern mask on Halloween and said "Johnny don't need no mask," and Johnny responded by beating the poor kid senseless. Rourke brings all his tortured soul to the part, and only makes this creature even more wretched and pitiable.

An older man named Mikey looks after Johnny and includes him in his robberies. For a particularly big heist, Mikey recruits the help of two pieces of street trash, Sunny and Rafe (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen, both of whom play just about the best scumbags you could ever hope to find) in order to pull things off successfully. The robbery goes bad, and Rafe ends up killing Mikey, while Johnny gets captured and sent to prison.

While there, a Lt. Drones (Morgan Freeman) mocks him and his looks but, after an inmate stabbing leaves Johnny in the hospital, a doctor (Forest Whitaker) takes pity on the man. Believing that Johnny's life choices are the direct result of the shame he feels from his disfigurement, he offers to reconstruct Johnny's face and to hire a speech pathologist to rid him of his lisp in order to provide a fresh start. After a few weeks of painful surgeries, we see Mickey Rourke's beautiful face freed from all those prosthetics.

Soon Johnny gets paroled and finds a job and even starts going out with a girl who loves him (Elizabeth McGovern), but there's only one thing on his mind. Drones correctly guesses that Sunny and Rafe would never recognize the new Johnny, and sure enough he hatches a plan to win the couple's trust with another robbery that would get him close to his foes. He even toys with them at first to make sure they don't see it coming; "There's something familiar about him," wonders Sunny after Johnny tells the two that he knows them.

For such a short film, it plays out with a great deal of tension and suspense. Until the ending that is. I won't give it away, but some characters suddenly get smart while others don't think at all, and the short length suddenly becomes very, very apparent. The film runs barely over 90 minutes, and the final bit unfolds after an hour and a half has passed. I can't really say why the ending doesn't stick with me other than the fact that it seems to thoroughly clichéd as to be interchangeable with any number of "guys trying to break out of lives of crime" stories. Hell, Mickey Rourke himself built his career in the 80s on films that had endings too similar to this.

Nevertheless, the film remains a must-see on the basis of its fantastic opening heist sequence and the acting performances of Barkin, Henriksen and Rourke. Rourke in particular knocks it right out of the park; he puts so much pain into the role that it breaks through even the prosthetics and only magnifies on his actual face. I think the film was written with any actor in mind, but when Rourke took the part and made it his own suddenly the short running time became noticeable. For my money, his portrayal here is in his top five performances, and for that reason alone you should track this above-average piece of 80s noir down; I believe the DVD is being reissued soon anyway, so you're in luck.

Million Dollar Baby

Despite my great admiration and respect for Clint Eastwood, I rarely get along with his films. Eastwood has a gift for visual minimalism and formalism, but the melodrama of his scripts creates an uneasy balance that, in all fairness, works. I don't know how he does it, but he pulls it off; however, just because they work does not make them masterpieces and, with one exception, I consider none of the films he's made this decade to be a classic.

Million Dollar Baby is not that exception. Working with a script from Paul "SERIOUS BUSINESS" Haggis, Eastwood crafts a story of a female boxer that occasionally moves us when it stops trying to shove us. The boxer in question is Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), an amateur with a lot of spunk who shows up one day at the gym of Frankie Dunn (Eastwood). Dunn used to be one of the most celebrated trainers in the business but, as this is a sports film that isn't Raging Bull, his reputation lies in tatters. We learn bits and pieces of his past when his friend Eddie Dupris (Morgan Freeman), who reveals those clichéd "You're not a young man anymore Frank. You know what happened the last time you did this" way. Freeman also narrates the film, because of course he does.

Initially, Dunn refuses to train Maggie. "I don't train girls!" Eastwood growls in that way that makes you forgive so many flaws. Then Haggis lays on Maggie's life story: she's poor! Look at her trailer trash family! She don't wanna be bussin' no tables fo' the res' of her life! Dunn cannot argue with that, and agrees to turn this 32-year old into a fighter.

In almost no time, Maggie becomes a prize fighter. We are meant to believe that it's through her sheer strength of will and Dunn's magic, but personally I think growing up with rednecks helps. She's so good that Dunn has to spend all of his savings just to convince managers to put their fighters in the ring with her. Even when he places Maggie in a higher weight class, she tears her way through the competition. Until one fateful fight, that is.

You know how, in Do the Right Thing, Radio Raheem sported brass knuckles that read "LOVE" and "HATE" (a reference to the masterpiece Night of the Hunter, in case you don't know)? Paul Haggis has some too, only his say "THEME" and "THEME-ER;" after a gruesome fight has dire consequences on the characters, Haggis starts swinging those fists into the audiences' faces with the same intensity of Maggie's blows. First Maggie's family shows up, and if you think Haggis was overselling it beforehand, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Then comes that infamous ending. Even though I can't imagine anyone being surprised at this point, I won't spoil it. It's meant to be moving but there's a disconnect: Haggis backs off to let Eastwood take over, but Eastwood sticks to his minimalism and the whole thing feels strangely hollow. The final scene does not necessarily fail because of this, but it lacks the impact such an event should produce. So this is how the film ends...

I do like the film, for what it's worth; matter of fact, I've yet to see an Eastwood film this decade I haven't liked (still haven't seen Changeling, though). Yet it presents perhaps the greatest imbalance between Eastwood's direction and the film's tone, and the film oscillates so often between the two extremes that I end up with a sort of vertigo. Swank and Freeman put in some great work, and of course Eastwood shines without having to do anything resembling "acting," and they elevate the film into something occasionally enjoyable.