Movie Review: The Dark Knight Rises

I didn't review the TDKR immediately after I saw the movie because then it would have just been a page of "OMG! OMG! OMG! That was so cool!!!!" over and over again. Now that it's been a week and I can think more clearly, I feel I am more equipped to provide an, if not unbiased, then at least a slightly more coherent review. So here it is.



OMG! OMG! OMG! That was so cool!!!!

Sorry, but it had to come out once. As you might have guessed, I enjoyed the movie. It was more emotional that the previous two installments, and on occasions teetered on the edge of melodrama, but didn't quite fall in. The movie begins eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, with Bruce Wayne living the life of a recluse. Thanks to Batman's catching the Joker and the passing of the Dent Act (named after Harvey Dent, Gotham's alleged white knight from TDK), crime has been all but wiped out of Gotham, leaving behind a Bruce Wayne with no focus and no real reason to live. Unknown to him, his considerable fortune has also been petering out, thanks to unwise business decisions, and he is one stock market crash away from bankruptcy. And then there's Bane.



The antagonist in this movie is one of Batman's newer villains, introduced by writer Chuck Dixon in 1993 for the specific purpose of providing Batman with a foe who was mentally his equal and physically, superior. In the comic books he is portrayed as a hulking beast, twice or thrice the size of a normal human being, face shrouded by a luchadore mask and powered by a mysterious toxin "Venom" that makes him as strong as the writer wishes him to be. Nolanverse has no place for such characters though, so Bane has been scaled down in terms of size, but not ferocity. He is an intelligent brute, frighteningly articulate behind a metal mask that reminds one of a gorilla's fangs. He kills like a gladiator, moves like an animal and talks like a revolutionary. He is not as interesting as the Joker (but then, who is?), but Tom Hardy is hampered by his mask but acts with his eyes and eyebrows, and creates a character who is believable as a tormentor to Batman.



The first act, other than a phenomenal plane hijacking sequence that's in every trailer of the movie, is spent establishing the new characters and subplots, of which there are quite a few. There's Selina Kyle (Anne Hatheway), a cat burglar who is smart, competent and tough, and yet caught in a situation that she can't get out of. There's Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), a Wayne Enterprise board member who comes to Bruce Wayne's aid in his time of need. And there's John Blake (Joseph Gordon Levitt), an earnest beat cop who has a secret that will make hardcore Bat-fans sqeal "YES!" at the end of the movie. The several plot lines may be confusing at first but come together brilliantly in a cracker of a finale that features a city plunged in real, honest-to-god civil war, the Batpod, and the requisite new aerial vehicle that looks like the Tumbler grew a set of rotor blades - simply called the bat.



Nolan's flair for cinematography and action choreography are in full display here, with jaw dropping sequences of aerial combat, ground war (with thousands of REAL extras - no CG here), and a fight sequence at the middle of the movie which may be the best I have seen in a long time. Also on display are logical inconsistencies and coincidences that seems to be part and parcel of every Nolan movie (for example, a question arises near the end to which the only logical answer seems to be "He called Superman"). Character's also behave somewhat erratically, although that can be a bit more easily explained by the fact that this is Nolan's Batman, so we cannot expect them to be like their comic book counterparts.





But none of that matter much, especially if you are a fan of Batman. It is a movie that goes to the soul of the character and provides him with an ending that is both satisfying as well as impossible in comic book form. It's not a cheerful movie by any means, in fact, it may be the most grim and humorless of all the Nolan movies, but that's because the stakes are so much higher. Batman get's put through the wringer here like never before, but if he wasn't, it wouldn't make his rise so fantastic to witness. Some people have complained that there's very little Batman in it, and yes, the cape and cowl don't make too many appearances outside of the finale, but Batman is more than that. Batman is a symbol of justice, of heart, and of love for Gotham, which is what the movie is all about. I wouldn't say it's a movie only for the fans, because non-fans should also love it, but being a fan of the character, like I unabashedly am, makes for a deeper, richer, more emotional experience.

55 Word Fiction: Mirror Image

Got this idea from another blog. Trying it here. The above words are not part of the 55

The same question. Every time, every week. Painful, but I was bound to her, and the truth.

She asked, and I let my mind free, searching for the inevitable answer.

Except this time, it was different.

This time, it was a new face, and a new name.

Snow White.

Oh, shit.

Movie Review: Snow White and the Huntsman

Warning: There be spoilers

Snow White is a grim, dark, joyless and usually humorless movie. It's not bad per se, and technical elements like the sets, locations and battle scenes are impressive in their own way, but the movie never really gets going until the last 20 odd minutes or so, and when it does, I had yawned one too many times to care. The story is a retelling of the classic fairy tale, and by retelling, I mean it's almost nothing like the original story. That much is obvious; a faithful retread in a big screen adaptation would be disastrous for a story as familiar and as paper thin as the original, but there is no story here either, at least not one to justify the movies 127-minute running time. The fact that this is the director's first crack at a feature film is glaringly obvious. The fact that the movie has three screenwriter credits is baffling.



So here's the story in short. A beautiful but frail queen has a daughter who is pure of heart and Kristen Stewart of beauty, the kind who expresses concern at the broken wings of birds. When not playing Florence Nightingale to actual nightingales, she gambols around with William, son of the local duke. Will they fall in love as adults? One wonders. However, after a particularly harsh winter, the queen dies, and almost simultaneously, an army attacks the kingdom. The army is defeated, but the king is bewitched by the beauty of one of their prisoners, and makes her queen. The queen Ravenna (Charleze Theron) kills the king on the wedding night and opens the castle gates for her creepy brother Finn to come in with an army, slaughter the residents, and initiate a hostile takeover. William and his father, the duke, escapes, but cannot rescue Snow White, who is incarcerated in a tower. Of course, the queen has magical powers, and a magic mirror who she bothers constantly by asking who the fairest of them all is. The creature, who actually comes out of the mirror and stands before the queen, looks like a man with a liquid gold bedsheet over his head. The special effect where it oozes out of the mirror in a slow moving river of gold is impressive.



Anyway, so the queen retains her youth and beauty by feeding on that of other young girls regularly. The kingdom suffers, the people beg on the streets and feed on scraps, and the queen and her brother trade various expository dialogue that go nowhere. Time goes by and one day the mirror tells the queen, who looks like Charleze Theron, no doubt in a fit of temporary insanity, that Snow White, who looks like Kristen Stewart and will soon come of age, will be the fairest of them all. Process this, if you will. But wait! There's a convenient plot point! If the queen consumes Snow White's heart, she will be immortal and forever young. Instead of shattering the mirror into a thousand pieces for holding back crucial information like this for a decade or so, Ravenna asks Finn to bring Snow White to her. Finn, understandably frustrated beyond belief after ten years of watching Charleze Theron disrobe and take milk baths right in front of him but not getting any, uses this opportunity to paw Snow White (Apparently Ravenna had forbidden him to go into her cell), and promptly gets stabbed for his trouble.



Snow White escapes into the dark forest, where few go in. Even the queen's magic is impotent there. Thus, they employ Thor to get Snow White for them. Unfortunately, Thor is tied up with the Marvel movies, so they get the huntsman, who Chris Helmsworth plays EXACTLY like Thor, and is apparently the only one who knows the dark forest. He catches up to Snow White, but is turned by her beauty, her spirit and her heart, and joins her in her quest to reach the Duke's castle. Snow White demonstrates all those qualities by falling down a lot and looking gravely concerned when the Finn and his men catch up to her, which is often.

The primary problem of the movie is that it tries to do too many things at the same time. It's not enough that the queen is evil, she has to be given a tragic backstory. However, because not enough time is devoted to this, it remains half baked, a collection of flashback sequences that flash by too fast, and snippets of a story that vaguely allude to her being used by others.



Snow White, in her travels, stumbles into a number of characters, including, of course, the seven dwarfs (who are actually well known British actors like Bob Hoskins, Ian McShane and Ray Winstone, converted to dwarfs via CGI and camera tricks). Again, there's too many of them, and thus, they rush by, their perils plucking no emotional chord because we barely spend time with them. Even central characters reveal little character attributes beyond what is strictly necessary. For example, we know the huntsman lost his wife because later it has to be revealed that one of the villains had something to do with it. It's a baffling reveal, and creates a forced connection by resorting to extreme coincidence. But what else? Nothing. The Duke's son shows up to be the love interest, but doesn't have any character traits beyond being the love interest, and while the movie does play with the idea of who Snow White will end up with, it's too scared to answer that question and leaves it hanging. Thus, characters do, feel and reveal exactly and only what is required, and not an iota more.



So other than the locations and CGI, what works here? Charleze Theron. Where rest of the cast, and even the movie itself seems to take material like Snow White being helped in her escape by birds (cos her heart is pure and she fixed the wings of one of them years back, get it?), Theron hams it up and chews so much scenery that she nearly swallows the movie whole. And it works. Where she can grimace, she snarls. Where she can snarl, she screams. Where she can scream, she unhingles her jaw like a snake and yells loud enough to wake the dead. It's over the top, and it's great. It's exactly what the movie needs. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast believes it's playing Shakespeare, and thus dialogue like "You have eyes huntsman, but you can not see! She is the One!" is uttered with gravitas and seriousness.

Snow White isn't a bad way to spend a couple of hours, but it could have been so much more by being a little less. The characters have potential but are never explored fully because there's so much happening. Kristen Stewart is a workmanlike Snow White, but doesn't bring the spark and determination that the character required, which makes her actions in the last 20 minutes so jarring. If you watch this movie, watch it for Charleze Theron. 

Hunger

It was late afternoon when it hit me. And when it hit me, it hit me HARD.
The desire. The craving. The...dare I say it...lust? Whatever name you know it by, I had to have it, and I had to have it now.

A cocktail of revulsion and desire swirled inside, warning me, censoring me, and yet, egging me on. I could see it inside my head, you know. I could see myself. Hell, I could taste it. Feel the soft flesh ripping under my teeth, bones and ligaments tearing, cracking, grinding under the force of my jaws. It was horrible to see myself like that, to realize that I could descend to a state as primal as that; guided wholly by instinct and hunger.
If there was a battle inside of me, it was over before I even knew of its existence. A lone voice of caution and conscience blinked in and out of existence in an instant. I was slave to its demands, hypnotized by the smell and taste of what I was to do. And all for what? For something that I knew would only hurt me...no matter what momentary pleasures it brought.

She slept beside me, innocent of my thoughts. Her breathing even, slow, sensuous. Sweat glistened on her, pooled beneath her eyelids and drenched the pillow under her head. The day was hot and muggy, but that made what I was about to do all the more alluring. How would she react, I wondered? Would she love it as much as I did? Would she want it as much as I did? Only one way to find out...

I leaned close to her, my fingers brushed her shoulder.

She awoke with a start.

"Honey, its really fucking hot. You wanna go to the mall and have lunch at KFC? I have a hankering for fried chicken like you wouldn't BELIEVE."