Thoughts on Downey, Dark Knight, and Iron Man

I really liked "The Dark Knight", but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me that agreed with Robert Downey Jr.

The Things He Said.

If Mr. Downey Jr. was serious and he wasn't misquoted, or if this wasn't an off the cuff joke that, stripped of its tone, came off kind of assey and willfully ignorant, is being kind of harsh here. But joke or not, I can see the essence of what he's saying:

I mean, yeah on a intellectual level when it comes to Dark Knight I'm there: The adult re imagining of the character, the Batmocycle, a Heath Ledger performance that was so good you forgot he's dead, the realistic portrayals of what it would be really, really like to dress up in body armour and a cape and fight a clown...for real.

There's no questioning that this is the best Batman movie that ever wore pointy ears and punched theme-coordinated street thugs in the face, hands down, bar none. From the dense James Ellroy-esque screenplay to the sober, measured direction of Christopher Nolan: Who managed the seemingly impossible feat of making what might be the best movie of the year and a Batman movie at the same time, and then had them be the same freakin' movie. Dark Knight is a rare case where the major studio strategy of grafting the Best Talent Hollywood Has To Offer onto a Big Summer Movie Property worked. No doubt about it: The Dark Knight was a class act all the way.

Now I don't want you to think that I'm being spoiled here, I know we as moviegoers have got a good thing going with this new Batman movie. As a movie, it's as good as it can be. However, I am now going to go on public record and say:

As far as summery superhero entertainment goes, I liked Iron Man better than Dark Knight.

That is not to say that Iron Man is a better movie than Dark Knight. It's not. And I understand if you think that it doesn't make sense to say: "I think that Movie 1 is an A+ and Movie 2 is an A-, therefore I like movie 2 better."

I get it, I'm on your side here, I really am.

It's just that there's one thing that Iron Man had that Dark Knight, in all its film noiriliciousness, did not: Iron Man was fun to watch while Dark Knight was like going to a really, really entertaining funeral.

I think part of the reason for my preference is that in many ways Iron Man was a throwback to the action adventure movies that Amblin made in the 80's. Bright, noisy entertainments that breezed along as much on the charisma of their leads as their visual effects. It was subgenre that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg willed into existence with the original Raiders and subsequently strangled to death in its sleep with Howard the Duck. It's a distinctive kind of bubblegum storytelling where even the serious action beats, when they occur, take on a kind of airy insouciance.

And the thing was, it didn't make Iron Man feel dated in any way. On the contrary it felt like a perfect fit. The mildly jokey fluffypuff tone matched the material perfectly. It was clear that the filmmakers enjoyed and to a certain degree respected the subject matter, but they didn't respect it too much. It wouldn't be right to call it throwaway, but it also doesn't stick around long enough to wear out its welcome.

Dark Knight, on the other hand, resounds with an almost operatic self importance. It practically beats you to death with all the subtlety that's on display. The combinaton of a screenplay that's stuffed with dialogue drenched in meaning and smothered in rich subtext with performances that start out perfectly honed, and are subsequently put on a program of steroids, injected with rocket fuel, and shot out of a cannon threatens to overwhelm the fact that this is, after all, a Batman movie.

Guy in a cape. Fights crime. Committed by clowns and alligator men.

Nolan's film doesn't do any disservice to Batman, on the contrary it blows the Bat/Clown conflict up to biblical proportions. But it's so concerned with being a great movie that it forgets to be a fun one. Even the Frank Miller comic from which Dark Knight takes its name and noir overtones (and little else) occasionally stepped back from big speeches (that seem a little too poetic for police commissioners and butlers to be coming up with off the cuff) and give a bit of a nod to the profound silliness of it all. Hell, in the first Nolan Batman movie Liam Neeson made fun of his superhero outfit. Those were good times. But it seems as if Nolan has made a conscious effort to outgrow that now, as if he wanted, instead of Bat-Man, to deliver Oscar Bait-Man. And the results teeter dangerously on the brink of arthouse pretentiousness.

I'm aware that there is a certain amount of stoicism that goes along with the Batman franchise, but I think in the next installment The Dark Knight could afford to lighten up just a little bit.

Just to add one more time, I really liked The Dark Knight. I think it's a great movie. Hooray.

The Bourne Sycophancy

Did something happen in the last week or so that made everyone lose their mind but me? Why in the name of all that is crap is everyone so intent on giving sloppy textual blowjobs to Paul Greengrass for The Bourne Whatever?

I'm at a loss. This movie has all the elements in it that movie critics love to turn up their snot crusted noses at: Plot free action, spazz-assed monkey editing, and shaky, shaky, shaky cam. But they make an exception for this piece of shit.

When I say shaky cam I mean shaky cam. This is cam that is as shaky as shaky can possibly be. Transformers looks like an oil painting compared to this movie. During most of this movie you can see nothing, literally NOTHING that is happening on screen.

Let me get a little more specific, here: They'll have a scene, like having the camera follow Matt Damon while he runs down a hall for example, where for a couple of seconds it just looks like the way a normal cameraman would hold a camera if he was running with it and wasn't a cartoon hunchback with two broken arms.

Then, all of a sudden, the camera will start to wobble from side to side for no reason whatsoever except to obscure the action that's going on. It's like someone was yelling at him "Hey, Camera Guy, I can see stuff on my monitor here! We gotta take care of that: Shake the camera like you have no idea how to use it!"

Then there's the action scenes which, apart from some bits where people type on computers and yell at maps on big-screen tvs, pretty much make up the whole movie. An action scene will start and the camera, which has been jittery up to this point, will literally have a conniption fit. Sometimes it's not even pointing in the right direction, we're just looking at a wall or a traffic light, or France or something. And when they do decide to bestow us with the fight scene or car chase we paid to see it's nothing but BLURS and SOUND EFFECTS! I might as well be watching a fucking RADIO PLAY!

It's not limited to the action scenes either: There's one conversation that's filmed over one guys shoulder at the guy who's talking. Gradually the camera tilts like it's slowly melting until nearly the whole screen except for one little corner in the upper left is filled with the shadow of the back of the guy's head.

Yet everyone loves it. They love it with waves of hyperarticulate critic love usually reserved for Very Important movies about England! And they're not just overlooking what I pointed out, they're saying that the fact that the action scenes are unintelligible visual mayonnaise is the BEST PART OF THE MOVIE! Go to Rotten Tomatoes and read some of the reviews. There are a few dissenting voices in there, but the vast majority might as well be accompanied by a picture of themselves naked and licking the poster. Such an image would not be inappropriate for any of the positive Bourne Whatever reviews. "He spends an entire fight scene filming the floor and parts of the bathtub? Badly? Genius! I pronounce him Best In Show!"

I thought action movies were in a bad way before, but if this shaky cam shit catches on, I don't know what's gonna happen to the genre. Between this, giant clashing army epics, and wire-fu it's getting so a brother can't watch a guy blow up a station wagon with a rocket launcher anymore. At least there's going to be a new version of "Commando" on DVD. Now there was an action movie.