If there’s a universally agreed-upon absolute banger of a summer blockbuster type movie from 2005, it’s gotta be Chrisopher Nolan’s BATMAN BEGINS, right? I’ve watched it many more times over the years, it holds up completely, and also seems historically significant as, among other things, a transition point between the ‘90s era of comic book movies and the seemingly endless one we’re in now. It kind of blows my mind that I reviewed it early for The Ain’t It Cool News and here I am two decades later writing more thoughtfully about it for a much smaller (but better) audience. Like a memory cloth cape tailored to fit a rigid skeleton when a current is put through it, time flies.
I haven’t experienced an era when people weren’t complaining about there being too many sequels and remakes, but I do remember a time before people complained about reboots, because it wasn’t until this movie that I ever heard that term. Nolan’s co-writer David S. Goyer (KICKBOXER 2) used it to explain that they were completely starting the series over. Not a sequel, or a sort of sequel with the same actors playing Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, but a do-over, a totally different take on Batman. I wish that definition had stuck – it’s useless now that it can mean that or a sequel or a remake.
Nolan’s successful turning on and off of the bat-computer seemed revolutionary in part because his notion of a stripped down, quasi-realistic Batman was so unexpected for the character. The expressionisticmovies of former animator Tim Burton had birthed the mega-garish ones by former costume designer Joel Schumacher – the series was synonymous with lavish artifice. BATMAN & ROBIN made money in 1997, but it became so widely hated that many believed it would be the end of Batman movies, and maybe even super hero movies as a whole. Luckily that gave Warner Bros. an opening to consider acclaimed indie directors with drastically different approaches. They tried developing one with Darren Aronofsky (who had only done PI and REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) before they settled on the guy who did FOLLOWING, MEMENTO and (at the recommendation of Steven Soderbergh) INSOMNIA. (read the rest of this shit…)
First thing I want to say is that I’ve been calling this movie “Oppy” while having no idea that it’s what everyone calls him in the movie. I guess it’s just the natural, instinctive nickname that comes to mind for J. Robert Oppenheimer, even before “J.R.”
Second thing I want to say is that I was so wrong about the phenomenon of OPPENHEIMER! I had been confused as to why people were talking about it as a sure-thing blockbuster smash, but here I am finally having seen it after 3 weeks of sold out shows at the Imax. I had to give in and buy the tickets a week in advance, and the show did sell out in the same theater that never filled up for DEAD RECKONING, JOHN WICK 4, CREED III, DIAL OF DESTINY, etc. There’s lots of hype about it being shot for Imax format, and this is is the only full Imax format screen in the state, so that’s important context. But still – a 3-hour R-rated drama about a scientist selling out every show every day for weeks? Just because Christopher Nolan directed it? Hooray for the auteur theory! (read the rest of this shit…)
I like Christopher Nolan’s movies. So, had things gone reasonably in the world, Christopher Nolan’s TENET by Christopher Nolan is a movie that I for sure would’ve seen right away in a theater. But… you know. So I didn’t.
Now, after having played some theaters in some parts of the world where some people think it’s safe to go to theaters, with months having passed since the professionals moved on to other topics, many seemingly unimpressed, TENET is on blu-ray, so I have seen it. And I will just say up front that I am very pro TENET. I really enjoyed it. People around these parts call me Bad Lou TENET, Port of Call This Movie Is Great.
First, let me start by pointing out that this entire review has been written as a palindrome. I’m just kidding. I could do it for sure, I know how, but I don’t want to show off. Christopher Nolan, however, has zero qualms about showing off, and I love him for it.
Git ‘r dun, kirk! Well dun, kirk. Done ‘n dunk, kirk. What have you dun, kirk!? You know you dun kirked up, don’t you? You know that, right?
DUNKIRK is Mr. Christopher Nolan’s WWII (World War 2) movie, a sweeping epic in visual terms but kind of an intimate story; a historic event depicted through the perspectives of three groups of lightly developed characters. I saw it in Imax, and I’d guess 98% of the movie fills the entire gigantic screen from top to bottom. They cropped it briefly inside a small boat (probly didn’t want gigantic closeups) but otherwise your field of vision is filled with sky, sand, water, helmets, bodies, smoke. And Hans Zimmer’s stress-inducing score frequently mimics a ticking stopwatch as we watch these thousands of British soldiers trapped on a beach in France waiting to see whether they’re gonna be miraculously rescued or bombed to shit.
Nolan gotta be Nolan, so he gave a simple story a uniquely tricky structure. He intercuts between the soldiers on the beach, some citizens in a small boat and a few pilots in the sky, but titles tell us that their stories encompass one week, one day and one hour, respectively. You never feel like you’re skipping around in time, but it’s an illusion, a timeline repeatedly expanding and contracting until it gets to the end. (read the rest of this shit…)
You guys heard of this INTERSTELLAR? Came out recently. It’s Chris Nolan’s take on the wide-eyed space exploration epic. The type of sci-fi movie that keeps its feet partly on earth, has no lasers or star wars in it whatsoever and tries to seem relatively semi-quasi-plausible by modern scientifical-esque theories. It’s definitely supposed to be a spectacle, but not in the complicated-cgi-creations-loudly-smashing-things-into-a-million-cgi-particles way we generally get now, or even the how-did-they-even-do-that style of the INCEPTION hallway scene. More in the LAWRENCE OF ARABIA sense of gigantic landscapes. It’s the type of movie made by and for people who get awe struck staring up at the stars and weepy at the thought of specific astronauts. People whose imaginations get boners from the idea of a manned mission to Mars more than they would from a monster biting the head off a robot.
So the truth is I’m not the audience for this movie. I was better in monster biting head off a robot class than in science. When a guy sitting by me in the theater said he read that the black hole created for the movie was so “mathematically accurate” that scientists were now making discoveries based on it, I literally had no idea what that meant. Still don’t. On several different levels. So keep that in mind when I tell you I liked, didn’t love INTERSTELLAR. But I’m still gonna write about it, ’cause this is America. (read the rest of this shit…)
The best way to explain the genius of INCEPTION is just to describe what’s going on at the climax. The main characters are all asleep on a jet, dreaming that they’re in a van that’s crashed and is falling off a bridge. All but the driver, Dileep Rao, are asleep and are also in a dream-within-a-dream where they’re tied together floating weightlessly in an elevator. Joseph Gordon Levitt is preparing to wake them up, the rest are asleep and in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream about blowing up a snowy fortress. But Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page are asleep there because they’re actually in a dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream where Leo is making the emotional decision to leave behind a SOLARIS-type living memory of his dead wife Marion Cotillard to go into a limbo to rescue his client, Ken Watanabe, who has lived a whole life there and is now an old man and forgets that he’s not in reality, because time passes at a different pace within each of these worlds. And there is a decades long slowed down music cue that tells Leo the van in the first dream is about to hit the water and wake them all up.
And here’s the kicker: all of this was understandable even on the first viewing for knuckleheads like me and the millions of people who made it a huge hit summer movie. I mean, you don’t have to like it, but it takes a silly motherfucker to deny the accomplishment of making such an effective mainstream thriller out of a concept this complicated. (read the rest of this shit…)
Last week I decided I wanted to see MAN OF STEEL a second time. (Don’t worry, I saw FURIOUS 6 twice too, so this is not a sign of disrespect toward its reign as Best Summer Movie 2013.) I already liked MAN OF STEEL but the second viewing raised my opinion of it. Going in already knowing what it was, all my minor quibbles faded away and I was able to focus on what I loved about it. It wasn’t one of those movies where looking at it again brings out all kinds of flaws you never noticed before. I mean, a few odd things came to mind:
* I wonder if they ever had a meeting specifically about the decision to have chest hair poking out of the neck of the supersuit. That looked a little odd but I can see how they were trying to remind us how manly he is. Not just super. (read the rest of this shit…)
I cannot tell a lie, I was really fuckin excited for the new Superman movie. I went to the midnight show and everything. I showed up way too early. I passed a guy dressed as Superman going into the john and might’ve given him a high five if I knew he’d washed his hands. I’m down for this. I wanted this to be great.
I’m not one of those people who shits on SUPERMAN RETURNS. I liked it, I just didn’t love it, mainly because I think it was shackled by nostalgia, held back by trying so hard to recapture the old Richard Donner movies. I know this is considered blasphemy in many circles (you’re gonna be hearing that a couple more times in this review) but I just don’t like those Superman pictures that much. They were great in the ’70s and early ’80s but to me they haven’t held up the way the Spielberg and Lucas joints of the era still do and will continue to. So as good of a job as Bryan Singer did of imitating that old version of Superman and goofball Lex Luthor and re-using the same font and music and all that, I feel like what I want to see now is start over and do a different take on Superman that’s made for the futuristic year of 2013. That’s what director Zack Snyder, writer David S. Goyer and producer Christopher Nolan have done with MAN OF STEEL and… well, I like not love this one also. But maybe like it a little more. Maybe a smidge closer to love on this one. I don’t feel high off it like I did off the Batman movies. But I am still thinking about it, and already want to see it again, see how it plays without all the baggage of expectations. (read the rest of this shit…)
Well, shit. I had been staying offline working on this review for a couple hours before I had to check a detail on IMDb and found out about the massacre in Colorado last night. Fucking horrible, man. Be safe everybody.
We had a fucked up tragedy in Seattle a few months ago, and even though that was on a smaller scale you see how many people it affects. For those of us blessed enough to be unscathed it still has a psychological effect, it forces you to think about yourself and your loved ones having to go through that. Because I walk by the place where it happened, I know people who went there all the time, I’ve dealt with mentally ill people that could’ve been that guy. Or in this case I love movies too, I went to a midnight showing too, alot of my friends did, alot of you guys did. It’s just as bad as all the other things we read about on the news but it seems more personal.
But I’ve also seen how the community has come together, has celebrated the lives and the art of the people who died, are continuing to hold benefit shows and fundraisers for the families and for the little cafe where it happened. You see that people really do care about their neighbors. And I hope we will also try to learn from these horrible things and figure out how to improve the system to identify the root causes and fix things, get sick people help or whatever needs to be done long before it comes to this.
Warner Brothers is pulling advertising for the weekend, canceled a premiere in France and all TV appearances for the stars, because it seems tacky to promote a movie during this. But instead this sick asshole gets to pretend he’s a super villain, he gets to be on TV, the whole world has to pay attention to him. He gets to stand in for the big summer event movie.
Is it wrong to let one psychopath intentionally take away this source of joy, this thing we’ve been looking forward to so long, that we we want to discuss and (possibly) celebrate? Or is it superficial to still want to do that in the face of this sickening loss of human life? I don’t think Batman movies are the most important thing in the world but shit, I want to talk about Batman movies!
I don’t know what the right thing to do is. Maybe it’s too depressing to think about right now, but when you’re ready for my review of the new Batman movie here it is.
THIS IS AN ALL SPOILERS, I’M-ASSUMING-YOU’VE-ALREADY-SEEN-IT REVIEW. If there’s anybody out there still deciding whether to see it or not this is not gonna help, don’t read it. (read the rest of this shit…)
Wow, I must’ve really misread the ol’ zeitgeist. I thought for sure with that depressing new Ben Stiller indie drama having come out on DVD last Tuesday GREENBERG was gonna be all anybody had on their minds for weeks. But the comments thread there almost makes it seem like you guys are more interested in this “Inception” business.
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Skani on Batman Begins (20th anniversary revisit): “First off, Glaive, if it’s not your thing, that’s totally fine. My view is that it has a more ambivalent…” Jun 25, 20:29
Ben C. on The Quiet Ones (2025): “I also would never have heard of this without the review, and then it turned up on Hulu for ultraconvenience.…” Jun 25, 17:33
grimgrinningchris on Back to the Future: “I really would liked to have seen the musical in its initial Broadway fun with Roger Bart playing Doc Brown.…” Jun 25, 11:12
grimgrinningchris on Herbie: Fully Loaded: “There are some good stories about the development of the script in Lennon & Garant’s highly entertaining book, Writing Movies…” Jun 25, 08:54
Mr. Majestyk on Longlegs: “I didn’t hate this one but it didn’t add up to anything. It felt like a dream journal. “So there’s…” Jun 25, 06:37
CJ Holden on Bewitched: “The whole SNAKES ON A PLANE soundtrack is actually pretty good in a mindless “top 40 with a very mild…” Jun 25, 02:28
Franchise Fred on Bewitched: “Yeah it’s really weird how much they overthought this. I guess The Brady Bunch Movie showed you could twist the…” Jun 25, 02:25
Glaive Robber on Bewitched: “@CJ, Snakes On A Plane actually prompted a supergroup to form, the appropriately-named COBRA STARSHIP, compromised of members of The…” Jun 24, 22:15
Glaive Robber on Batman Begins (20th anniversary revisit): “@Skani, sorry for the late reply. I agree with you that the movies (correctly) focus on what you mention. I…” Jun 24, 21:46
Curt on Back to the Future: “My wife and I went to see BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL when it came to town recently, and…” Jun 24, 21:21
Crudnasty on Bewitched: ““Many people will never find out.” This review had me grinning throughout, but that last line just made me laugh…” Jun 24, 18:35
Miguel Hombre on Batman Begins (20th anniversary revisit): “X-MEN (2000) in my mind is the beginning of the modern comic book movies timeline that exists today. That movie…” Jun 24, 16:50
Aktion Figure on Barbarian: “So…WEAPONS?” Jun 24, 16:47
CJ Holden on Bewitched: “I work buddy of mine was maybe Germany’s biggest Will Ferrell fan* and swore that this was the god damn…” Jun 24, 08:33
June 15, 2005
I haven’t experienced an era when people weren’t complaining about there being too many sequels and remakes, but I do remember a time before people complained about reboots, because it wasn’t until this movie that I ever heard that term. Nolan’s co-writer David S. Goyer (KICKBOXER 2) used it to explain that they were completely starting the series over. Not a sequel, or a sort of sequel with the same actors playing Alfred and Commissioner Gordon, but a do-over, a totally different take on Batman. I wish that definition had stuck – it’s useless now that it can mean that or a sequel or a remake.
I like Christopher Nolan’s movies. So, had things gone reasonably in the world, Christopher Nolan’s TENET by Christopher Nolan is a movie that I for sure would’ve seen right away in a theater. But… you know. So I didn’t.
Git ‘r dun, kirk! Well dun, kirk. Done ‘n dunk, kirk. What have you dun, kirk!? You know you dun kirked up, don’t you? You know that, right?
You guys heard of this INTERSTELLAR? Came out recently. It’s Chris Nolan’s take on the wide-eyed space exploration epic. The type of sci-fi movie that keeps its feet partly on earth, has no lasers or star wars in it whatsoever and tries to seem relatively semi-quasi-plausible by modern scientifical-esque theories. It’s definitely supposed to be a spectacle, but not in the complicated-cgi-creations-loudly-smashing-things-into-a-million-cgi-particles way we generally get now, or even the how-did-they-even-do-that style of the 
(spoilers, of course)
(contains THE SPOILERS)
Wow, I must’ve really misread the ol’ zeitgeist. I thought for sure with that depressing new Ben Stiller indie drama having come out on DVD last Tuesday GREENBERG was gonna be all anybody had on their minds for weeks. But the comments thread there almost makes it seem like you guys are more interested in this “Inception” business.
