EVAN, KATE, ERNEST, AND MY BLOODSHOT EYES

I'm back! (Now let's see if I can remember how to do this...)




I've got some good stuff on the table that I'll have ready in the next couple of days, but this evening I just wanted to let something loose to say hi, and that the time off was fun, even though I did end up working a whole lot of that time, and even more so this week to make up for all that I didn't do while I was off watching movies with my nephew. And we did watch us some movies. But there's something I have to admit...

I've met two people in my life since graduating from college in 1981 who really shifted my perpsective concerning my own film-going habits and cinematic knowledge. The first was a terrific, caustic, crazy, raucous woman by the name of Kate Perrier, who I met in 1987 when I first moved to Los Angeles. When I came here I figured I knew a lot about movies. I graduated with a film degree, by gum, and I saw five, six, seven movies a week, if I could arrange (and afford) it. Who among the small group of friends I found myself amidst in my early days as a transplanted Oregonian in Los Angeles could dare to compare, thought I? (I was a haughty little prick, wasn't I?) Well, I soon found out that Kate Perrier could, by gum and by cracky. This woman, who died after several bouts with cancer in 1994, knew old Hollywood, the French New Wave and the American "Golden Age" of the '70s like the oracle at Delphi, and that's basically how I ended up approaching her. She knew a lot, her interests were varied beyond films, and she had a brutal sense of humor, three qualities that made spending time with her (she was a senior editor in the office where I had found a job) a pleasure and quite rewarding. Without ever lording her encyclopedic knowledge of movies over me, or anyone else, she earned my respect as someone who was cool and sharp enough to understand the importance of film history without needing validation so badly as to constantly call attention to and trumpet that knowledge. She wasn't in it to make anyone look dumb or herself look so smart-- she just loved movies, and her enthusiasm was infectious. And in very short order she made me realize that I didn't know shit.

The second is my nephew, Evan Cossey. My dad would probably say the same thing about Evan that he often did about me-- "That kid doesn't do anything but sit around and watch movies! He's gonna disappear into that couch!" In fact, there were times during our week together when I thought that very thing. And my wife was convinced that he was bored out of his mind all week long, because I did very little during the day to "entertain" him in the way that one typically commandeers the schedule of a house guest-- with the exception of one weekend trip to Legoland to start off his week, there was no Disneyland, no Universal Studios tour, none of that. While I worked out of my house during the day, Evan would get up as late as possible from his air bed on the living room floor, brush his teeth, eat a bowl of cereal, take a shower, and hit the DVD player. Hard. And his mother will confirm that this was exactly what he had in mind to while away his days-- total access to a library of 700+ DVDs and no one to bug him about getting outside for some sun or insisting that he do something constructive with his time. It was a dream come true for him. And back in my college days, if given the same opportunity, I probably would have enjoyed the same schedule. But I don't think, even at my most prodigious level of cinema consumption-- five or six movies over a weekend, plus sometimes four or five during the week (including ones seen in class), during my college daze-- I would have ever had the endurance capabilities of Evan Cossey. We saw seven movies in the theaters last week-- pretty exxxx-treme, right? Well, while I was working, Evan stuffed another 13 movies in the cracks on DVD, including one intriguing-looking bit of CGI anime called Appleseed a total of three times. If it were me attempting a viewing schedule like that, my bloodshot eyes would have been rolling around useless in their sockets like Visine-soaked marbles. My friend Bruce and I like to think that our viewing habits, especially when we get together, are pretty hard-core, but we've both got to throw in the towel to Evan. As I said in the one and only comment I posted last week, with apologies to Pete Townshend and Elton John, I've just handed my film nut crown to him, to him, to himmmmmmmm...!

All right, back at it. I've got my tickets for the Alex Theater screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly coming up July 23 and for the Arclight presentation of Once Upon a Time in the West (I'll post a link to the Leone Festival again sometime next week, for those of you who care to be reminded), and I've got plenty of stuff to write about in the coming days, including some big-ticket items I've been promising for some time now. Special shout-outs to Thom McGregor, Blaaagh, Benaiah, Machine Gun McCain, PSaga (my date for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly-- Patty says she gets enough good, bad and ugly at home!), Virgil Hilts, the Mysterious Adrian Betamax, Alison, Sharon and all the rest of you whom I'm forgetting in my late-night delirium that stuck with the site during my down time-- thanks for hanging in there with me.

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"Work, work, work, work, work, work-- How ya doin', boys? Nice to see you! I missed you!"

-- Gov. William J. LePetomaine to his super-stacked secretary, from one of the sacred texts, that being (FILL IN THE BLANK)

First one to drop the right answer in the comments column gets a kiss and a hug (glory is a better motivation, to be sure, but I'm in a friendly mood tonight).

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Finally, rest in peace, Ernest Lehman, the legendary screenwriter who counted Sweet Smell of Success and North by Northwest among his many credits, and who, like so many of the great ones, went unrecognized by the Academy until his honorary Oscar in 2001. This, from David Thomson's Bioghraphical DIctionary of Film, by way of David Hudson and the good folks at GreenCineDaily:

"Around the age of sixty, Ernest Lehman seemed to have stopped doing scripts - and that's our loss. Of course, he may have been writing away (like Billy Wilder) on screenplays that are smart, funny, and beautifully constructed, only to be told that no one has the patience for movies like that any more and, anyway, what does he know about what kids want? So the kids are deprived, too, and everyone misses Lehman's subtle way of getting us to grow up."

Something to ruminate upon before and after the blockbusters of summer begin to pile up and smolder together on the ash heap of quick and dirty (and loud) sensation. Good night, Mr. Lehman, and travel well...

PEE-WEE AND A SUMMER VACATION OF SORTS

Finally, just a quick note to pass along courtesy of my friend Katie, who tells me of an outdoor screening of Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure courtesy of Cinespia in the heart of Hollywood next Saturday night. Sounds like a lot of fun. But will Amazing Larry be there?

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Well, looks like I’ll be having some fun entertaining my nephew Evan from out of town next week. Evan carries on the newly formed tradition in my family of being an unapologetic movie freak when all around you are either callously indifferent or not quite as freaky as you (I like to think I started this tradition). Anyway, we’ll be taking in as many films as we can pack in over the next week, including his first experience at a drive-in (the Vineland in the City of Industry, the only ozoner left in Los Angeles proper), and I’ll be attempting to work at least a 40-hour week on top of all that, so I may not have much left in me for blogging next week. I’m not saying I’ll be absent, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be less prolific than usual. I’ll try to keep abreast and at least post some comments, if not any new articles, and then when I come back I’ll let you know what Evan and I ended up seeing. Have a great week!

NOTES ON SUMMER ACTION CINEMA Part Four: BAY'S NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN

Michael Bay may be getting most of the attention this summer, but there are three other directors, and perhaps now even four, who I admire, and whose specialty is action with a certain higher level of craft, intelligence and cinematic virtuosity than the average 900-pound gorilla. When I see their names in the credits, it’s really all I need to know.

The directorial work of ex-special effects craftsman Joe Johnston (Star Wars is chief among his many credits) has been consistently satisfying and shot through with far more wit and elegance than one might have guessed could come from one so technically oriented. His films are wizardly and cheerfully grotesque (Jumanji), rousing and elegantly detailed (The Rocketeer), brisk, lean, and heartstopping (Jurassic Park III), humane and filled with the poetry of the everyday (October Sky), epic, affectionate and engaged with American mythology (Hidalgo). One of the reasons I worry about Michael Bay and his ilk becoming the standard for action filmmakers, and filmmakers in general, is the inevitable devaluation of genuine talents like Johnston, whose gifts are square within the scope of traditional cinematic storytelling. I continue to hope that his facility with the narrative of big-scale filmmaking will continue to keep him in the hearts and minds and BlackBerries of the Hollywood hotshots.

Another action director worth keeping an eye on is David R.Ellis, a former ace stunt coordinator who has only two films to his credit as director, but they are doozies. If you decried in the last few years the toothlessness of the mainstream horror thriller, get thee to a DVD player and rent Final Destination 2, the nearly universally trodden-upon sequel to the modest hit Final Destination, in which a group of kids deplane from a doomed flight and inadvertently save themselves from Death, who comes stalking them in ever more gruesome, jerry-rigged ways. Ellis’ sequel continues the same basic concept, and it’s a bit dicey in the logic department at times, but as a showcase for Ellis’ ability to stage awe-inspiring road destruction, even Bay must have bowed down after seeing the opening 10 minutes of this movie. And the movie gleefully restores the bad-ass bloodletting of disreputable ‘80s horror films and ups the ante considerably, thanks to some of the most clever CGI-enhanced gore yet seen. Ellis also headed up last year’s exceedingly clever car-chase thriller Cellular, which should have garnered some mention in our big Los Angeles movie debate of a couple of months ago. It’s a terrific travelogue of L.A. and a snappy critique of the cellular phone culture, courtesy of a devilishly sharp concept by screenwriter/director Larry Cohen in which a kidnapped woman contacts an average kid on a cell phone, convinces him her life and her family’s life is in danger and to try to help her, all without losing the tenuous cell phone signal that has become her lifeline. Ellis’ facility with action is put to marvelous, agile use here—he juggles some pretty fragile balls intelling this story and manages to keep them all in the air with a casually sadistic grin on his face, which will be matched by the one on yours when you see Cellular.

I would include two others on my list of interesting new action directors based only having seen one film from either of them: John Moore, who directed the intense remake of The Flight of the Phoenix, and Louis Leterrier, director of Unleashed. (Leterrier is also co-director, with stunt coordinator Cory Yuen, of the Luc Besson-scripted The Transformer, and well as sole credited director of the upcoming Transformer 2.)

These are the guys that give me hope for the American action cinema.

NOTES ON SUMMER ACTION CINEMA Part Three: THE MICHAEL BAY PROBLEM

Last week Slate editor Bryan Curtis wrote a “What? Me Worry?” piece in defense of the aesthetic of director Michael Bay, the general gist of which was a none-too-sly implication that those who weren’t on board with Bay’s tactics as a pummeler nonpareil in the fine, nonintellectual (he typed with a straight face) tradition of what has become known and defined, thanks in part of Bay’s contributions, as the summer movie, were flying in the face of the inevitable. Here’s Curtis:

“The apoplexy Bay's movies inspire reveals something interesting about film critics: That no matter how much they insist that they've made their peace with the summer movie, and its bullying domination of the multiplex, they can still go limp at the idea of the summer movie as an artistic end in and of itself. Bay is a pure creature of summer, a man who has no ambition other than to dazzle and pummel. As he once put it, savoring his critical infamy, "I make movies for teenage boys. Oh, dear, what a crime."

Curtis is out to get some goats with this piece, in a garrulous, nondogmatic manner, to be sure, but he’s also all about trying to position Bay as some sort of innovator who’s (here we go again) just giving the people what they want, yet attempting to fashion an aesthetic purse from what others (critics) have been conditioned to accept only as a sow’s ear— that is, the preconception of a “summer movie” as by definition beneath the realm of art. Well, if the roots of the modern summer movie can be said to extend further beneath the surface of film history than the emergence of Michael Bay, then we might see that one of the first examples, if not the first example, Jaws, is not exactly without critical acclaim to go along with its popularity. So what does Curtis mean when he writes about “the idea of the summer movie as an artistic end in itself”? Is he talking about pure sensation detached from the artistic impulse to explore character, themes and techniques designed with something other than heightened blood pressure as a desired end? If you look solely at the faintly glib conclusion of his article, you might be forgiven for thinking so:

“There are those who say that watching a Bay movie is itself like watching one long chase scene out of context, as Bay whips from one image to the next, but I think Bay is on to something. He's whittled the summer movie down to its smallest constituent parts—without the clutter of character, cohesion, or exposition.”

But it’s clear from looking elsewhere that, for Curtis, Bay’s work, and presumably its acceptance at the box office, represents the evidence that the kind of hyperactive editing and “look at me, ma!” camerawork that is its hallmark has made the transition from all-flash-no-substitute signpost to “an artistic end in itself":

“’Fast-cutting’ is seen as a hackneyed technique of music videos, not cinema. In fact, patching a bunch of quick cuts together is a massive undertaking in the editing room.” (The fact that “patching a bunch of quick cuts together is a massive undertaking in the editing room” is somehow apparently evidence unto itself that the technique is not hackneyed. Curtis never elaborates, but instead goes on:) “Moreover, Bay has a fluid, gliding camera—he's using quick cuts to create atmosphere, not to whip up false momentum.”

What the hell does Curtis mean by “creating atmosphere”? Bay applies the same frenetic editing style to every situation, be it action or dialogue based, so can it be said that for Bay there is only one “atmosphere” with which his films are imbued? And what atmosphere can be created by the excessive visual bombardment of a 30-40 cuts per minute of footage? Perhaps that of sitting on a crowded airport tarmac while sitting six inches away from and staring directly into a strobe light, which was exactly what sitting through Armageddon in a movie theater felt like to me.

But his claim that Bay uses this technique for atmosphere, and not to whip up false momentum, is the single biggest chunk of balderdash the article has to offer. If Mr. Curtis had ever sat through Bad Boys II, as I did last night, he would have witnessed the spectacle of Michael Bay creating scene after scene loaded with false momentum. The movie features one absolutely smashing (literally and figuratively) car chase involving several vehicles and a truck transport loaded with cars which the baddies unleash from the trailer and drop into traffic, causing some spectacular and rather beautiful vehicular mayhem. The scene flirts with deflation by Bay’s insistence on cutting to reaction shots from the titular bad boys (Martin Lawrence’s wide-eyed fear, Will Smith’s hooting and expressions of “extre-e-e-e-eme” excitement), but there’s no doubt the momentum in this scene is the real thing.

Unfortunately, none of the other big sequences (especially another car chase in which the obstacle du jour dumped from the fleeing vehicle this time is not other vehicles, but a truckload of morgue stiffs) measures up to the effectiveness of this first chase (which occurs 30 minutes into the movie’s incredibly bloated 145-minute running time). Each big action sequence is alternated with "hilarious" character by-play between Lawrence and Smith, which not only adds immeasurable and inessential minutes to that bloat, but effectively kills the movie’s real momentum. (As a father of two daughters, I was, however, grateful for a very inessential scene in which Lawrence and Smith intimidate a young boy coming to call on Lawrence's 14-year-old daughter. It builds up a head of comedy steam I found very funny and with which I experienced much empathy.) So each Lawrence/Smith breather is shot through with as much phony editing (which can’t serve to move the story along, because the scenes themselves aren’t designed to do so) and swooshing camerawork as the director can think to pack in, all of it intended to give the viewer the impression that something is happening when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Curtis finishes off this section of his piece by quoting one of Bay’s professors at Wesleyan, Jeanne Basinger, as saying that rather than using rapid-fire editing to “create atmosphere,” what Bay is really doing is attempting to “introduce something like abstract expressionism to the $150 million blockbuster.” Would that be anything like a professor trying to assign some dubious artistic rationale to a former student’s methods in order to minimize her own embarrassment?

For Curtis, there is an implication that, within a few generations, Hollywood will have, through its various processes of cannibalization of previous pop culture iconography and methodology, produced a director who knows nothing but “the grammar of blockbusters—the bastard son of Top Gun’s Maverick and a velociraptor.” What he doesn’t seem to see, or at least accept, is that a summer movie need not be, by definition, divorced from character, cohesion and exposition in order to achieve some reductive transmogrification into artistic expression-- Batman Begins ought to be evidence enough of that, and there’s reason to hope that Land of the Dead and even War of the Worlds might also fulfill that hope. Those who hold these beliefs might also hold that Curtis’ prognostication has already seen fruition, and that Michael Bay has already achieved that Maverick-velociraptor hybrid status. It’s never clear through what Curtis writes whether he thinks this is a bad thing or not, but he’s certainly for embracing Bay’s deconstructive aesthetic approach, which is simply a glib way of saying that it just doesn’t matter, albeit a bit wordier than a shrug and a “who cares?” There’s the definite implication that those who would worry about such things are almost exclusively calcified dinosaur critics who just aren’t on Bay’s wavelength the way most paying audiences are. (Does anyone really still hold to that old saw about paying audiences voting with their dollars? And if they do, how about asking them what they thought on their way out of the cineplex?)

Strangely enough, my viewing of Bad Boys II instilled a faint ray of hope for Bay’s next project, the upcoming sci-fi thriller The Island. My aesthetic objections to the Bay movies I’ve seen have been pretty much consistent across the board-- The Rock, Armageddon and Bad Boys II all featured the same aggravating editing, the overwrought, insistent camerawork, and a certain approach to character that could be described as “crude” or “rendered in broad strokes.” But my objections otherwise have been either script-based-- the screenplays for The Rock and Armageddon were almost pathologically averse to common sense and believability—or attitude-based—if two-thirds of the allegedly charming interaction between Lawrence and Smith had been cut from Bad Boys II, as well as some of the redundant action (and any first-year film student could have probably done the job to effectively tighten up the pace), Bay might have had a snappy, 105-minute action film on his hands instead of the lethargic clunker into which the movie devolves.

Yet The Island is his first job out from underneath the Jerry Bruckheimer umbrella, and it boasts the promise of genre sophistication that his other movies, generously speaking, have not. And anyone who wouldn’t trade Ben Affleck, Nicolas Cage, Josh Hartnett, Will Smith and Martin Lawrence for Ewan MacGregor, Scarlet Johannsen, Steve Buscemi, Djimon Hounsou , Sean Bean and Shawnee Smith, well, you probably think Michael Bay’s trying to inject abstract expressionism into $150 million blockbusters and is onto something with this whole whittling the summer movie “down to its smallest constituent parts—without the clutter of character, cohesion or exposition” business.

Divorced of the hip-hop, bling-bling bullshit bravado of the Smith-Lawrence show and the jingoism and visual mayhem of Armageddon, I think The Island has, if it’s got anything like the frenzied smackdown theatrics of that first car chase in Bad Boys II up its sleeve, a real chance to be Michael Bay’s first good movie. But that said, if it is it won’t be because I’ve suddenly bought into this business of Bay and others like him fragmenting audiences’ attention spans with eyeball-crushing edits and deafening sound in search of that great, awesome thrill-ride movie experience. It’ll be because Michael Bay finally figured out a way to put that prodigious ability to stage action to the service to telling a story worth telling in a manner that tells it well. Consider my mind open and my fingers crossed.

NOTES ON SUMMER ACTION CINEMA Part Two: FISTS OF FURY FLY OVER UNLEASHED

Frequent commenter and regular site visitor The Mysterious Adrian Betamax, who only reads articles from this blog by printing them out and taking them along on bathroom visits (which I take, believe it or not, as a huge compliment, knowing as I do the sanctity of one’s bathroom reading time), has harangued me in person about my enthusiasm for Unleashed. He held that my claim of Jet Li never having displayed better form as a martial artist than he does in this movie was evidence that I hadn’t seen any good Jet Li movies.

There are a couple of things wrong with this complaint. I think that having seen and loved Once Upon a Time in China series, Tai Chi Master, Fong Sai Yuk and Fist of Legend might suggest that I have at least an inkling as to what constitutes a good Jet Li action performance. Of course, I’ve not seen every Jet Li movie, good or bad, so how could I make such a claim that Unleashed featured his best work as a martial artist? The answer: I didn’t. A quick look back at my comments reveals that what I actually wrote was, “Li has never been better as an actor, and perhaps never better as a pure martial artist, than in this movie.”

The key word, of course, is “perhaps.” “Perhaps” is important because, as anyone who has even seen a picture of me ought to be able to suss out fairly easily, I’m not a martial artist myself and would be foolish to claim any expertise about them in any other light but my own experience of them in movies. I can only make assessments about this kind of athletic performance within the framework that the movie constructs, so any judgment I put forth about the quality of the performance of a martial artist must necessarily be read with this qualification in mind (a qualification I suspect also holds true for the Mysterious Adrian Betamax and 90% of all other appreciators of movie kung fu fighting).

The word “perhaps” also implicitly invites the suggestion that there may be other, better examples out there to which I would gladly be directed by anyone with knowledge of them, since my experience with Jet Li movies is incomplete, as is my experience with almost any nameable film artist (the only all-knowing, all-seeing completist I know of is the giant pulsating brain that resides behind the oversized curtain in the city at the heart of the Internet Movie Database, and even it doesn’t really have it all covered). Film writers should be able to be relied upon for the intelligent application of thought and experience to the films they write about, but it should never be assumed by the reader, nor implied by the writer, that one’s knowledge is sufficiently all-encompassing to make sweeping pronouncements of the kind the M.A.B. took me to be making. I will say, however, that I should have been as qualified in my assessment of his acting and wrote instead, “Li may have never been better as an actor than in his movie,” to avoid anyone assuming I’m trying to claim absolute knowledge of Jet Li as an actor either.

All that said, I stand by my enthusiastic endorsement of the movie. I suspect the M.A.B. may object to Unleashed because it is not a Hong Kong-generated film, but that would only be a guess, because he has yet to actually articulate to me why the movie is no good, in fact, flat-out awful. Therefore, I invite him, or anyone else who has seen Unleashed and passionately disagrees with my high opinion of it, to check in on the comments column of this post and tell me why I’m wrong. I’m not interested in discrediting anybody for their reactions, but I certainly would be interested in hearing about them, and I will argue back. The collar on this debate has now been removed.

NOTES ON SUMMER ACTION CINEMA Part One: BATMAN BEGINS

It took me about ten minutes into the running time of Batman Begins before I got that familiar buzz. You know, the one you get upon delivery of honest goods to the entertainment receptors of the brain that are used to being outright ignored or clogged by endless, half-assed repetition of tired themes and bloated budgets for big-ticket movies that should have never seen the light of day. I’ve felt that buzz already this year watching Kung Fu Hustle and Unleashed—it happens whenever it starts to hit me that, yes, the filmmakers are onto something, and that what I’m watching has a really good chance of turning out to be a good movie. And that’s what Batman Begins is that the other Batman films, including Tim Burton’s influential and moneymaking first foray into the world of Bruce Wayne, are not—an entirely terrific movie, and not just a stunning piece of set design directed by a man only sporadically interested in the telling of a ripping tale, or a shallow super-freak villain showcase which quickly degenerates into a hopeless can-you-top-this carnival of desperate, hammy acting.

Director Christopher Nolan manages to find a near-perfect balance of filmmaking showmanship, narrative energy and psychological weight to lend to the telling of the half-familiar tale of Batman’s origins. He takes matters seriously enough to wring real emotion from the assassination of Bruce Wayne’s parents (the only part of Wayne’s background Burton chose to dramatize, and then only half-heartedly). But then Nolan, along with coscreenwriter David S. Goyer, proceeds to devote, with some deft chronological imbalances familiar to those who experienced the temporally unmoored pleasures of the director’s ass-backward noir Memento, nearly another hour to Wayne’s isolation and training with a group of justice fighters called the League of Shadows, which provides the basis of the philosophy he grafts onto the facing of his fears (personified by his revulsion for bats) by battling criminal forces back in his home city of Gotham. It is only after this compellingly told back story is methodically laid down that the central figure of Batman, as we are familiar with him, ever makes an appearance on screen. By then our appetite has been whetted. We’ve been enveloped by a more realistic foundation on which the story of that winged hero must be built, and Nolan, with actor Christian Bale delivering a complex and nuanced performance as Wayne, turns out to be more than up to fulfilling that promise.

The Gotham of Batman Begins is definitely influenced by the expressionistically overwrought city Anton Furst designed for the 1988 film, but that influence does not fall into simple plagiarism—it has a festering, grotesque grandeur all its own, and it feels, from the air and the ground, like a city we might recognize, one in the midst of a breakdown, in a freefall from beauty. Also, there is no trace of the ghastly cartoon bloating of the Joel Schumacher movies—there is humor, but it is not italicized and punched up so obviously that even the most witless audience member might be sure to correctly interpret the jab in his ribs. Strangely, for some Batman Begins seems to have not enough villainy, or rather, villains not grand enough to constantly catch our eye and color in the operatic expectations left unfulfilled by the central superhero. Thus, the movie has been shrugged off by some who ended up feeling, ironically enough, that Nolan’s mistake was in overemphasizing that hero, that is, the titular character-- not a mistake often attributed to writers and filmmakers who are usually right to ensure that the eponymous character, be he Batman or Macbeth or Ivanhoe, ends up being the central focus of the story.

But Nolan’s instincts are right; the satellite disbursement of malevolence in Batman Begins is a perfect antidote to the maddening silliness of the Schumacher films, and even the off-putting grotesquerie of some of Burton’s concepts of criminality. Here, there are ever-increasing layers of Gotham corruption and evil embodied by three separate villains who share that focus, but never throw the balance of the film out of whack—mob boss Carmine Falcone (an excellent Tom Wilkinson), a perfectly skin-crawling Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), known also as the Scarecrow (whose fate, thankfully, is left open-ended, all the better for a future nerve-rattling reappearance), and Ra’s Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe), high priest of the League of Shadows, who exits the film early only to have his most twisted views of the perpetuation of justice carried out by a fourth figure more closely tied to Bruce Wayne. But the movie always returns to Wayne’s motivations—revenge, tempered by a sense of social responsibility, and a desperate need to use his newly assumed identity as a vehicle for confronting interior demons that rage nearly as dangerously as those on the city streets-- and they infuse the action with just the right flourish of righteous indignation and disoriented buzz.

The movie has also been criticized as a bit of a hash in terms of its ability to visually map out and make clear the geography and choreography of some of its fight scenes. As a pretty strong objector to the usual sort of slice-and-dice editing that tends to render movement and graphic continuity within action sequences incoherent, I saw this kind of approach in Batman Begins as having, if not a ultimately different narrative effect than, say, one in a routine bad action film, then at least a believable psychological rationale. In a crummy action movie, an overly edited sequence is usually a pretty strong indicator that the director may not be confident in his staging or his ability to convey the power of the fight in visual terms, and therefore he overworks the Avid machine to hopefully make a limp sequence somehow snappier, or at least cover up its flaccidity. Nolan may not yet be any more comfortable with more personal, small-scale fight sequences either—his are largely broken into shards of sudden movement from the shadows, an unexpected frenzy of chaos. But, at least in the initial sequences when Batman begins taking various groups of baddies by surprise, there is a psychological motivation to this kind of editing, which produces a disorientation in the viewer quite similar to the one being experienced by the surprised thugs who Batman swats around—a disorientation similar to the one the young Bruce Wayne feels when, at the bottom of a well, he has his first traumatic encounter with bats, enveloped and overwhelmed by the flapping of wings in his ears, claws and teeth pulling at his hair.

Unfortunately, this psychological rationale doesn’t hold water by the end of the film, when Batman must face his final foe. A one-on-one battle between two nemeses who once had a much different relationship would seem to suggest that Nolan’s camera (manned by the capable and talented director of photography Wally Pfister) might better serve the battle by stepping back a pace or two, and that his editors resist the temptation to punch up each arm movement and successfully delivered blow with its own cut. By editing the sequence in this fashion, the action (which by now most audiences will be willing to follow, no matter the aesthetic misdemeanors used to present it) is violated, the editing loses its effectiveness, and it reduces the impact of an otherwise powerful ending confrontation by a simple few, yet quite noticeable, degrees.

Happily, though, Batman Begins, cruising on the conviction of its director to virtually recreate a familiar mythology in more realistic, edgier film-noir strokes, survives to the end as an excellently told comic book movie. It’s a movie with little fear of its own darker hues that wants to be taken fairly seriously, yet is hardly so inordinately glum and posturing that it renders itself pretentious, and therefore unworthy of being taken seriously at all. It’s a beginning that shuffles the history of the Batman character and forces a different perspective on his various past incarnations. It’s a beginning that feels like a solid foundation for many more tales hopefully as well-told as this one. It’s a beginning that signals hope for the future, not only of Batman, but for the prospect of other intelligent, ambitious blockbusters making it through the straitjacket homogeneity of the Hollywood production mill with their brains, hearts and souls intact.

NO, YOU HOLD IT BETWEEN YOUR KNEES! Lorna Thayer 1919-2005

Lorna Thayer, the character actress probably best known for her role as the waitress who refuses to take Jack Nicholson’s order for toast in Five Easy Pieces, has died after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Thayer's 39-year career as a character actress in movies and TV began inauspiciously in 1952 in a B-western called Texas City, with her first big role coming four years later in The Beast with a Million Eyes. Although she would work with directors such as Robert Wise and Billy Wilder (she played bit parts in I Want to Live!, The Andromeda Strain and Buddy Buddy), her film career was largely limited to roles defined as often by societal position as by name—Grocery Clerk, Prison Guard, Passenger on Mexico Flight, Hospital Attendant and, of course, Waitress. TV would be slightly kinder, as it would to a lot of working actors throughout its history; she appeared in roles of varied importance in the ‘50s and ‘60s on such shows as Medic, Studio 57, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin, Dragnet, Have Gun-Will Travel, Johnny Ringo, The Untouchables, Bonanza, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Garrison’s Gorillas, It Takes a Thief and, after a long hiatus from TV, a final guest appearance on CHiPs in 1977 in a role described in the credits (and on the Internet Movie Database) only as “Matron.”




That famous scene from Five Easy Pieces, an awards-show favorite from the 1970 Academy Awards straight on up through today, is funny and entertaining, all right, but I’ve always found that standoff with Nicholson also quite uncomfortable and not just a little disingenuous on the part of Nicholson, writer Carole Eastman, and director Bob Rafelson. The movie was one of the few post-Easy Rider pitches to the sympathies of alienated youth that actually succeeded in making a cultural ripple all its own, and as such was loaded with anger, toward the older generation that had frittered away the opportunity to connect with their sons and daughters and toward the Establishment that allowed for that older generation’s calcified morality and corruption. So when Nicholson begins his tug of war with the waitress over the toast, which ends with him trashing the table and leaving the diner trailing an air of frustration and, of course, a sense of triumph, of having in some way stuck it to the Man, the audience is primed and ready to go with him, laughing all the way at his subversive outrage. The problem is, the movie scores all its points in this scene by Nicholson berating a woman whose sole function is to exist as an Establishment symbol, when the reality is, this waitress is far more the victim of any Establishment repression, being a minimum-wage worker in a diner, than is our hero, a cultured, piano-playing oil worker who walks off his job without a second thought because he knows he’s got his (corrupt) daddy’s money to fall back on. (Substitute "struggling actress" for "waitress" and "pampered movie star on the rise" for "cultured, piano-playing oil worker" and maybe my point becomes clearer.) The waitress plays by the rules of the restaurant in refusing Nicholson’s order because if she doesn’t, she’s likely to lose her low-paying job and have to hit the pavement in search of another one that might not even be as good as the one she’s got. Rafelson and Eastman’s point might have gone down a little smoother had Nicholson demanded to see the manager and taken out his self-righteous frustration on him. But would our sainted antihero have had the balls to stand up to a man, perhaps one far bigger of frame and weight than him, in a similar situation? We never find out, because it’s easier and funnier to let Nicholson have his way with someone who’s sassy enough to spar with him a little but who won’t fight back when he loses his cool over a piece of toast.

It’s a tribute to Lorna Thayer, as “Waitress,” that the thing I remember most, and most fondly, from not only that scene but from the whole of Five Easy Pieces, is the disgusted smirk on her face as she reads back the order that last time, before asking him, “You want me to hold the chicken?” Would there were an alternate-universe director’s cut in which she, not Nicholson, gets the last word: “No, you hold it between your knees, asshole!”