The Tory Party

Pineapple Express

Is the best non-Pixar comedy I’ve seen since Shawn of the Dead Shaun of the Dead.

There. I said it.

Go see it.

(Not just cos it’s got a bunch of NCSA alum on it.)

Dark Knight, now with criticizing!

I have seen it twice. I am full of knowledge. Also full of spoilers, so beware.

Black is the new black

We all know it is a great, great movie. We know it will beat Titanic. We know it is a crime drama on par with Heat. We know that the writing alone is so good that the movie could just have been shots of the pages and it still woulda broke $100 mill.

Still, I must heckle. For this movie has ONE FATAL FLAW. Perhaps it is a flaw that serves to exaggerate the greatness of the rest of the film, such as the preposterousness of Red Eye, or the creamy pink thing that tastes of fluoride that I just found floating in my coffee. Ewwww.

Perhaps. But this fatal flaw is, again, Rachel Dawes. The character is flouncy where she should be imposing, lisping like Drew Barrymore when she should be simmering like Kathleen Turner. Her connection to Harvey Dent is eventually what drives the entire third act, and yet that connection is utterly unexplored.

I don’t fault Maggie Gyllenhaal for this. I feel the wrongness of her moments in context of the rightness of everything else in this movie points to flawed directing. Plus there’s SherryBaby.

I propose the following small changes to the universe to make Dark Knight perfectly perfect:

• Cast Rachel McAdams. No disparaging Maggie Gyllenhaal, but Rachel McAdams is a better fit, for a couple of reasons. She has the kind of extravagant beauty that would inspire the Joker to want to destroy it — just like Jared Leto’s in Fight Club. Thus the leering malice the Joker exhibits while handling Rachel Dawes’ face would make more sense.

  More importantly, Rachel McAdams exudes warmth. You could toast a bagel on her close-ups. If Harvey Dent asked her Rachel Dawes about marriage, you would feel her fear of hurting his feelings instead of Gyllenhaal’s mild annoyance. “Ugh! I don’t have an answer! Gawd!”

  
  If you need me I’ll be over here exuding warmth.

  Of course, my cure for world hunger is also to cast Rachel McAdams.

• Some alone time for Rachel. Even just one shot, to illustrate the conflict she feels between her (ostensibly doomed) love for Bruce and her (actually doomed) love for Harvey. Looking at a picture of Harvey while at Bruce’s penthouse would be nice. Hell, Googling his daggum name would be a step in the right direction.
• When Harvey gets in the armored car, direct Rachel to be upset for personal reasons. Rachel Dawes has been cool to a fault at this point — fearless before the Joker and already indifferent to one attempt on Harvey’s life! When Harvey chooses to become bait, NOW would be a good time to show a human emotion. Some waterworks. Some bargaining. “Please don’t go, Harvey, and I’ll marry you.” That kind of thing.

  At the very least Rachel would seem to take this caper as seriously as everyone else. By flouncing around and telling him it’s bad for the case, she at best seems a bit… medicated.

• Dress her like a real attorney. “The Wire” would be a good point of reference here. The flouncy blouse and freaky high heels she wears to question Mr. Lau are unforgivable. You don’t even see the heels — but you see how they make her walk, like she’s wearing tiny trampolines. It’s so silly and undermines the gravity of the scene.

  
  This is more like it.

• Stay on Harvey when Rachel dies. For the events that are about to follow, it makes MUCH more sense to show Harvey’s reaction rather than Rachel’s death. Harvey refers twice to having to lie to his loved one and listen to her die — that should be a moment we can refer to, too. Yeah, he’s lying on the floor in a pool of oil. Show it anyway.

  
  Dent’s sizzled good looks… Chiseled! I meant chiseled.

Oh, man, talking about this just reminds me of how good this movie is. How the Joker actually accomplishes more to take down the mob (taking half their funds) than Harvey Dent does. How absolutely every little plan backfires (even Rachel strategically picking Harvey over Bruce). How the more strategic a person is, the less able he is to meet his goals:

Why so Sirius? OMG, I’m sorry I had to…

(Apparently the Complete Scoundrel says Batman is “Lawful Good.” NO. Superman is lawful good. Batman is, definitively, Neutral Good.)

The dog metaphor is completely out of control. Apt that Batman annihilates in hand-to-hand combat, subduing a whole armed SWAT team, but he has no defense against Rottweilers, because there is no strategy to a dog attack. Joker compares himself to a dog to hangs his head out a car window. You could even look at Joker’s gasoline-flinging as a kind of territorial marking.

Oh — and is Harvey Dent dead? I submit that his surviving a fall from that height is double-foreshadowed — Maroni comments that a similar height isn’t enough to kill someone, and Batman himself survives the same fall!

One question — what happens after Rachel and Batman go out the window at the party? Does Joker’s posse just leave, figuring they’ve caused enough havoc? Did they keep looking for Harvey?

Why are Rachel and Harvey both immediately convinced their “friends” are coming for Rachel? Wouldn’t saving Harvey be a better strategic move for Gotham?

HEY! Didja notice that the weapon Joker uses to escape his prison cell (”I just want my phone call”) is a piece of broken glass, generated by his ass-beating from Batman? AH HA HA I LOVE THIS MOVIE. I wondered why Joker goes from so vague to so helpful — he starts volunteering information as soon as he’s got that piece of glass! MWA HA HA!

So Joker does have plans sometimes — they’re just short term. Like a dog rolling over for bacon. Mmm. Bacon.

BACON!

I definitely didn’t have these kind of ponderings after Titanic.

Dark Knight

Very good. Very very good.

In fact, I don’t think I have anything to heckle, and you wouldn’t want spoiling anyway, and I just want to make fun of Batman Begins again.

(In other news, I just realized where I recognized Heroes’ Charlie Andrews from.)

Good ti-i-i-imes.

Wall-E

R U Ri U R U U Ri

Um.

I am so sorry.

I think there’s something wrong with me.

When a movie has 98% Fresh on RottenTomatoes, and it doesn’t quite do it for me, I think the problem is obvious, and it starts with T.

So if I tell you I preferred Kung Fu Panda to Wall-E — kind of a lot — I know that I am coming from a place of madness. MADNESS. But while I was watching Kung Fu Panda — like, by the second act — I thought, “I’m gonna have to see this again.” Wall-E — not so much.

SPOILERS FOLLOW.

OK but all the robot stuff was ossome

SERIOUSLY. SPOILERS FOLLOW.

I feel like a dystopic future movie needs to have a little more science or a little more whimsy. This one’s Tomorrowland at Magic Kingdom just didn’t address the big questions for me — can you just ‘take up’ farming in a polluted city? Hell, is there oxygen, considering there are no plants? How many will die when the first dust storm overtakes them? Where are the other ships? Did everyone get to escape Earth, or just the ones who could afford the intergalactic cruise line? Why does Otto take one order against its will but no others?

Consumption propels the society (blue is the new red) but no one seems to have a job. There are children but people appear too physically weak to reproduce. There’s no hierarchy, no competing objectives — not even among the robots herding them. The film thematically centers on “do what is right, not what you’re told.” Yet the passengers group-think their obedience to the captain as readily as they do to advertising and robots.

Good luck finding stills of the Wall-E people. Here’s Jeff Garlin instead.

The trailers for Wall-E made me think he would be leaving Earth to join a ship of robots. I think I would have dug that better — robots who have adopted the habits of their long-extinct human originators. Then much of this satire could have proceeded unhindered by an actual need for plausible, reversible human behavior. A unifying feature of dystopic future stories is that the society at large is not redeemed at the end — usually the heroes find their own redemption (or demise) as the group does business as usual, or… you know… they all die. ‘All die’ is a bit of a fixture. ‘Cause of all the dystopia, doncha know.

I could dig a few people electing to go back with the ‘bots. But I can’t really buy so many people overturning 700 years of complacency because the captain walked across a room.

The thing with the plant didn’t make sense to me, either. “If we find just one plant on the entire planet, we can go home.” HUH? REALLY? So in order to turn the ship around, you put the plant in this one thingy, and that’s the only way to do it, by the way.” HUH? REALLY?

So. The human plot didn’t fly for me. The robot plot did a lot better, but still:

• I wish Wall-E hadn’t held Eve’s hand while she was out of commission. I’ll spare you a rape allegory, but the hand-holding is the big consummation of their relationship, and it should have been left ’til the end. As it is, he sorta force-holds it, while looking at a sunset. It is unclear how he feels about this compromise. So when Eve takes his hand at the end, it’s sort of lacking, like, “Hey, babe — hate to break it to ya, but I already did this with you while you were asleep. OOPS.”
• I wasn’t moved when Wall-E loses his Wall-E-ness. Contrast this with the fact that Johnny 5’s brush with death in Short Circuit 2 makes me cry every time. I feel like Pixar pulled a Disney here — shying away from the frightening emotional core. Wall-E gets incapacitated by a motherboard-frying, then pulls it together enough to start running around again (or did he get fixed and I miss it? I remember a fade to black in the junkyard). He blocks a lowering platform, but we see this in only wide shots — no indication of what Wall-E is going through. Is he struggling heroically? Is he allowing himself to be killed for the greater good? We speed through Wall-E’s loss of humanity to the resolution — there is no montage of Eve toting him around as he did her, which could have worked.

  
  10 if short circuit 2 goto 30
  20 goto 40
  30 sob
  40 end
  

  Contrast this with the end of Monster’s Inc, where the story so completely convinces that I was fooled twice in a row — and still cry today.

  Hell — I misted over at the halfway mark of Kung Fu Panda.

• Wall-E disappears for a while. That’s weird. It might have been better if HE was the source of historical information for the captain — if HIS unique perspective of humanity was what convinced the crew to go back. That could have worked. Show his recorded montage of human awesomeness. Convince the captain, convince the passengers. Make the passengers more active uprisers. Dude. I am a genius.

Time for nitpicks!

• Noise in space. WE HAVE TALKED ABOUT THIS. I know, I’m being unfair — everybody does it. The sound mixer would kick the director’s butt.
• The ship tilts, and everyone slides, a la Titanic. That shouldn’t work, right? No matter how gravity is generated on the ship, right?

But the closing credits were totally bangin’. J’approve 100%. Kate Bush does Narnia; Peter Gabriel does Wall-E. Everybody happy.

Cloverfield

Re

Com

Mended.

Required viewing for anyone interested in film technique. I don’t mean film technique. That makes it sound prissy. What I mean is, how what the camera does affects how the viewer feels. That one.

I left the theater reasonably satisfied. But the images stayed with me so that… no, that sounds prissy, too. What I mean is, THIS MOVIE HAUNTS MY BRAIN. The “you are there” feel of it totally worked, and improves with time. The beefs I had with the suspension of disbelief, the limits of human endurance, leaps of logic DO NOT MATTER.

I saw it. I would see it again in the theater. That is saying a lot.

Anything else would spoil it. I went in not knowing more than the trailer, and so should you. The feeling of hurtling blind into the unknown is half the fun.