Holy Bogart!

Drag Me to Hell

I'm back from the dead! But still emotionally dead.

I saw Drag Me to Hell at a preview screening last week, in the hopes that I could fulfill my shameful dream of getting an early review posted on Aint it Cool News. They didn't run it. As it turns out, the film is advertising heavily on AICN, and the stupid animated Harry Knowles GIF was updated with a DMTH theme. So much for alternative voices! Anyway, here is my initial screed, which I will not edit so as to conserve the vitality of the first impression, and out of laziness.
Director: Sam 'CGI' Raimi
Year: 2009
Leads: Chick from Matchstick Men, Justin Long
Rating: *1/2

I'll try not to get on soapbox with this reaction to Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell, but I shall lay my opinions on the director out briefly for some background. I loved Evil Dead II as youth, quite liked Army of Darkness, and loved Darkman. Everything else ranges from mediocre to garbage (a range perfectly exhibited in the Spiderman trilogy). That said, I was excited about this screenign as potential return to form, and had heard good things despite the P(ussy)G-13 Rating.

So how was it? Pretty terrible. The film has a huge overarching problem that pretty much shoots it in the foot from the get go. We are introduced to the dilemma in an abrasive opening sequence in which a poor lad has been cursed with the gypsy demon, and gets Dragged to Hell. Didn't even look like he had a fighting chance. Then, in the opening titles, we are given some clumsy-sly exposition on the nature of the possession: the demon fucks with you for three days, and then Drags You to Hell. We already know that the Hell Draggin is probably inevitable, and we already know the symptoms. Thus most of the movie is spent playing catch-up to what we already know, as the protagonist tries to piece together the obvious.

This leads to a subsidiary problem: This nasty gypsy demon toys with its prey, but waits till the three days are up to burst through the ground and Drag Them to Hell. Thus we know that nothing consequential will happen to the heroine until the end, which renders the various possession scenes pretty void of tension. She'll get spooked by shadows, see eyes in her cake, and get thrashed around a bit Exorcism style, but as an audience we don't feel any real sense of danger or consequence. Perhaps we might have if the possession had ancillary effects on people around her, but its established that everything that happens happens when she is alone, or its the spooky ghost movie trope of "all in her head." The film tries to milk this for comic relief, but it doesn't really work. That kind of thing has been done to death since Drop Dead Fred.

As to the horror itself? There are occasionally effective blips of effects work and pretty gnarly images, but all of it is relegated to jump scares. Which might actually be the biggest problem with the movie. It could literally be titled Jump Scare: The Movie. It happens probably over twenty times. It's mildly effective on occasion, but mostly just grating and irritating, especially given that none of the hauntings pose much of a real phsycial threat to our heroine. (Sorry I'm not using names, I can't remember any.) There are actually two scenes where Raimi jump scares the audience with a CGI hankerchief (technically three). Come on, Raimi. If you're going to try and freak us out with a hankerchief, use the real deal. CGI is used elsewhere in the film to similarly poor effect, but in a positive note most effects work appears to be practical, something of a relief after Spiderman: The Rubber Doll Trilogy.

The acting is for the most part perfunctory. The heroine doesn't offend, but she doesn't make much of an impression. There are a few labored attempts to give her depth (she's used be fat, from a farm, and her mom's a alchie), but it doesn't really register and we aren't given much reason to sympathize, or even jeer, at her character. I think the movie was trying to make us root for the demon to some extent, but the tone is so inconsistent and unfocused that no discernable elements of black comedy or satire conclusively emerge, leaving something of a stilted PG-13 misfire. Justin Long is on hand as the least convincing closeted gay man trying to please his parents on record. I don't think this was supposed to be implied, but in lieu of anything better to do while watching the movie I concocted this backstory to add some depth to the proceedings. But in general he lacks screen presence and has zero chemistry with the heroine.

Also, the script was mostly painful, and at times it felt like the actors were awkwardly improvising just to get to the end of the shot. Plotwise, aside from the other inert elements I discussed above, we spend over two-thirds of the movie pursuing dead ends, which are pretty obviously dead ends, until the helpful psychic character suggests giving the curse away. This was irritating and reminded me of why I didn't like Wolf Creek: two-thirds of the movie were essentially pointless to the plot. Not what I would consider a spook-a-blast. The obviously false climax in a graveyard was surprisingly tepid, and didn't even bother trying to trick the audience that that durned evil demon was all taken care of. The ensuing everythings-okay-now-but-UHOH-not-really! sequence was pathetically obvious, especially to someone who has seen the Evil Dead Trilogy and is pretty damn sure Raimi isn't about to let the ending stand. The ultimate twist is essentially anarrative and based completely on coincidence, and doesn't really have anything to do with the plot or thematics, such as they are, of the film, giving the MWAP-MWAAAP ending little impact. I mean, I literaly snapped my fingers a half-second before the ending title card, it was that rote.

But I don't mean to be a Tommy Talkback Troll! There were some good things going on amongst the wreckage. For one, it was shot confidently and well, particularly the practical effects. It was refreshing to see a modern horror film that didn't look like watered-down J-Horror or retard-glossy Platinum Dunes. So that was nice. Also, the fight scene early on between the heroine and the gypsy in the parking garage was actually great, and stood shoulder to shoulder with some of the best moments of Evil Dead, which got me pretty pumped. Particularly the amazing gummy mouth unwanted mouth contact (which sadly gets defused by turning it into a repeating gag). I really thought Raimi was back in form for a second.

So, that's my verdict. Fine to see as a free screening, but otherwise be prepared for the Raimi of Spiderman 3 to blast your spooks.

Regards,

Jonah Hexidecimal

Afterthoughts:
-It's a damn shame I didn't get Jonah Hexidecimal printed as a code name.
-The film is getting glowing reviews. This goes to show how low standards have fallen for actually effective, edgy, or even funny horror films. DMTH is none of these. See Evil Dead II for an effective example.
-The one negative review I read was aware enough to notice the dull repetition of the scare structure/demonic haunting scenes.
-The positive reviews all point out how tongue-in-cheek and darkly comedic the film is. I guess it is if you consider the main character getting puked on a lot as tongue-in-cheek, and a confused self-aware tone as darkly comedic.

Twiddle Twaddle

Hello! I apologize for a lack of regular updates recently. I have been busy. Busy drinking.

But expect a resumption of spirited activity, including a new blog project, movie reviews, pictures of my flaccid micropenis, and more!

For now start following my new Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/codypeaceadams.

Twitter is stupid like a fox.

Kicking and Screaming, by Ethan

Now it is time to introduce another writer to The Erection of Disbelief's anemic stable: Ethan!

Ethan begins his tenure with a dressing down of Noah Baumbach's insufferable Indie "classic" Kicking and Screaming, which is actually harder to watch than Will Ferrell's Kicking and Screaming.


by Ethan

Director: Noah Baumbach
Year: 1995
Leads: Josh Hamilton, Parker Posey, Olivia D'abo, Chris Eigeman
Classification: Indie Dramadey

Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach’s 1995 debut film about a group of recent college graduates paralyzed by the transition to adulthood, purports to show how cleverness and disaffection serve as defenses against the demands of emotional maturity, and there’s no doubt that the movie is a testament to just that. Educated, culturally upper class liberal arts graduates, the four male best friends spend their fifth year hanging out on and around campus, deferring decisions about what to do with their lives. Grover, the lead, dwells on the girlfriend who dumped him to move on to grad school abroad. They’re assholes, and by the end of the movie they’re still assholes.

The movie is a minor cult favorite, and many people in the same broad demographic as the characters identify with it specifically, above the horde of other films about twenty-something malaise. Kicking and Screaming throws down its cultural markers early and frequently, opening even before the title appears with the Pixies’ “Cecilia Ann”. Tonally the song is an arbitrary choice, out of joint with the scene it plays beneath, but it functions as a blunt signal for Baumbach’s coevals to identify with what’s on screen. Likewise, the first line of dialogue has a character asking, “Who would you rather be stranded on a desert island with, McNeil or Lehrer?” That doesn’t mean anything and no one would ever say it (the latter could be forgivable if not for the former), but the movie flatulates this strained, low-rent Woody Allen wit throughout. Like the scene in Annie Hall where a guy namedrops Marshall McLuhan and McLuhan himself shows up to say, “You know nothing of my work,” the movie doesn’t actually demand any such understanding from itself or its audience – all that matters is recognition of the reference, substituting the invitation to self-flattery for a real joke. Likewise, it doesn’t matter who you would rather be stranded with.

These quips come fast and furious throughout the movie. Ostensibly, the reason is in part to point out their immaturity and the way they mask the characters’ personal uncertainty and fear. However, the boys’ smugness is unleavened by anything that would provide a basis for sympathy, because the movie makes no inquiry into the root of their paralysis. In its attempt to create a recognizable facsimile of a particular period of life for a particular kind of person, the movie leans completely on the empathetic reflex of audience members who’ve been there but gives itself a pass on the demand to universalize or contextualize the boys’ problems. What’s different about Jane, Grover’s girlfriend, that lets her seize an opportunity for herself? We don’t know enough about her to answer that.

Our only small glimpse at life beyond the four leads is of Grover’s dad – like them, an academic type who is still an immature mess – as he goes through separation from his wife. Decades older, he’s going through the same identity crisis they are, serving as a warning to Grover to get his shit together. Presumably, the movie wants to suggest that their paralysis comes from allowing intellectual overconfidence to compensate for an underdeveloped emotional core. It’s a reasonable take because it’s realistic, but not because the movie itself does any work to explore the matter, preferring, exactly like the boys themselves, to stay cocooned in the milieu it knows rather than traumatize its smooth self-consistency with fresh perspective. Our exposure, like theirs, to anything other than their own stale and redundant company is perfunctory, leaving no basis for allowing the characters’ situation to be meaningful. Baumbach doesn’t owe us an answer to why the boys feel like this, but he at least owes us the question.

Unfortunately, even simple empathy is difficult (beyond the empty “I’ve been there” feeling that endears many to the film), because the movie primarily announces the character’s malaise instead of dramatizing it. The thematics are completely foregrounded by the dialogue, but in it rather than through it. Nothing happens, people just announce to one another how they feel and whatever else the movie wants to convey in a given moment. For example, Max says (in no particular context), “What I used to able to pass off as a bad summer could now potentially turn into a bad life.” This is how the film conveys to us its characters’ states of mind.

Even their relationships to one another are bared mainly via the boys literally stating the roles of each of them within the group. Since the characters have no back stories and little to distinguish themselves from one another beyond a couple of empty quirks – thus, not only no future but no past or present – there’s nothing to anchor them beyond their role as tokens of a type. They don’t have enough particularity to attain any sort of universality except by brute force of proclamation.

What we do get exposed to about their behavior to others, including one another, is cruelty and mockery, unbalanced except by a proximity to one another that’s just a reflex borne of fear. But the movie never makes the case for their worthiness or capacity for redemption; instead we just get their sense of entitlement. Baumbach expects us to sympathize with it up front even though the movie does nothing to explore it. The class roots of their surliness is the movie’s biggest missing piece, but Baumbach accidentally shows his hand when he approvingly has Max, one of the four grads, start a relationship with an underage working-class girl to validate his own sense of superiority.

The annoying banter and lifeless characters are devastating failings, because the movie relies entirely on its dialogue for effect. Kicking and Screaming is an early forerunner of the indie/mumblecore genre where lack of visual imagination is compensated for by dialogue and character drama. This isn’t a failure in itself but even aside from its vacuousness the dialogue is grating. The characters try hard to sound dry and witty, but the movie means for them to be successful. Instead, we get Grover saying (to Jane about the graduation walk), “You know, even though all 618 of us were wearing caps and gowns out there today, I couldn't help but think it was a coincidence that we were both wearing black.” Obnoxious even if they were actually funny, these would be insufferable people in real life but no less so here. Every conversation sounds like an overwritten script for the benefit of someone listening in. This, by the way, is the problem with excusing the movie’s egregious quippiness and cultural namedropping as an object of critique within the movie – that function gets subsumed because audience enjoyment of them is the movie’s main gambit for excusing its structural floppiness, visual ugliness, etc. Even the back-of-the-box description cites the “endlessly quotable dialogue,” and the DVD menu screen literally features an audio-only recital of quotes from the movie.

Kicking and Screaming makes some efforts in the direction of visual style, and a few succeed – the smoky blue shot of Grover, back to the camera, slouching in a chair as he talks to his dad on the phone, conveys his loneliness better than the rest of the movie. This is exceptional, though, and most of the movie’s visuals seem deliberately attenuated. Baumbach paints everything with the same babyshit palette, flattening every setting and character into a single dull morass.

It’s clear that Baumbach has carefully transcribed his own experience at college, but he hasn’t added anything to it. There’s no reflection, just a reliving of his anxieties on film and the expectation that the unadorned reenactment of those events will evoke in others the same level of emotional response that they do in him. Instead it incites the same aggravation as its main characters do for anyone they talk to. It’s no doubt difficult to dramatize boring, annoying people doing nothing, but this display of ugly narcissism wouldn’t deserve the sympathy anyway.

We Wanted Information: Rest in Sixes Patrick McGoohan

Today a great human being died his earned death.

I am speaking of Patrick McGoohan, creator of The Prisoner, the best TV series, and pretty much the best anything, ever produced by our simian hands.

Patrick McGoohan, after the conclusion to The Prisoner, was forced to leave England after the baffled and threatening response. This is a testament to his genius, as the Huguenot of television.

After producing several very successful seasons of the spy show Danger Man, he abruptly refused to continue the show, instead insisting that the BBC give him the largest budget ever given to a BBC show at the time, while also demanding complete creative control. The BBC agreed, and mankind is better for it.

McGoohan also appeared in various films, and is especially notable for turning down the role of James Bond post Sean Connery, and later on for refusing the roles of Gandolf and Dumbledore. The man knew what was what, in a way that the rest of us can only hope to imagine.

I remember watching Scanners for the first time a year or two back, and thinking to myself, 'That older doctor with the beard is awesome. I wish I could look like that at his age." During the credits I discovered that this was none other than the immaculate Patrick McGoohan. It was like cheating on you wife at a costume party, and discovering that the woman in question was you wife all along.

Patrick McGoohan, live gloriously in the genius' Valhalla. You took that information to your grave.

(Above is a pen and ink portrait of Patrick McGoohan that a friend made for me for my birthday, which is proudly displayed on my wall.)

The American Viewing Public and Body of Film Critics are Wrong, Part 2

I am back with another assault on the system, maaaan.

The Wrestler


Once every year there’s one hyped melodrama that draws nearly universal acclaim and awards accolades at the end of the year, usually something that’s pretending to be an art house film, but is actually a by-the-books weepie. This year that film is The Wrestler. This movie has one of the most transparent, sappy, pretentious, and self-serious scripts I’ve ever seen, which I guess explains why Darren Aronofsky was attracted to the project.

Essentially there’s nothing to The Wrestler. It feels like somewhat wrote a thin outline of a serious drama, peppered with a few clichéd examples of the kinds of line the characters would say in the full draft. Rourke is pretty good in the role, but there just isn’t much there to work with other than general forlornness. He does a decent job of injecting some personality into a severely underwriter role, but this ultimately does not save the film, though his face and body are fascinatingly freakish. The plot is non-exultantly thin, and mostly comprised of generic subplots involving alternately a stripper with a heart of gold and an estranged daughter, neither of which are very good.

The Ram’s eventual breakdown also doesn’t make much sense and feels out of proportion with the inputs, making his, uh, tragic? final scene almost embarrassing to watch. There is one cool/hellish scene with an extreme underground wrestling match though, with glass and staple guns and barbed wire and nails. This exhibited the old freaky Aronofsky for the most part is nowhere to be found in the Wrestler, hiding behind affectedly non-affected Mickey Rourke’s back cam.

Blindness


Now here’s a movie that was completely shat on by the critical consensus, and floundered at the box office. My little brother tells me that he was standing outside a theater in Portland when a free screening of Blindness ended, letting out a crowd full of angry viewers, complaining about the wasted time. And these were Oregonians!

I can see why everybody hated Blindness. It’s about as bleak as you’re going to get from a wide release in the United States. I think this film caused widespread discomfort by nailing the portrayal of the blindness apocalypse so viscerally and realistically. I imagine that if hundreds of people struck with blindness were tossed into a quarantine with little food that things would probably play out as depicted. With shit everywhere, madness, and a complete destruction of the individual’s concept of personal space. Also, no one likes a gang rape scene.

My only quibble with this movie is an unnecessary and distracting occasional narration from Danny Glover, and that the ending was too positive for my liking. I didn’t even mind Julianne Moore that much! Blindness is better than Slumdog Millionaire and The Wrestler combined; why didn’t it take home any Golden Globes last night?

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button


Again, I think this movie is fairly good, and technically fascinating. But sadly not among the best films of the year, though I would feel less bitterness in my heart if this somehow won over its competitors at the Oscars. Assuming it’s even nominated.

Anyway, Benjamin Button suffers from a heaping dose of Forrest Gump syndrome. You can pretty much watch this as David Fincher’s version of Gump. So it’s a lot better, but still Forrest Gump at heart. Right down to corny, overbearing narration, kindly black folks, a war sequence, age coming of, windfall inheritance, quirky/tragic side characters, episodic pacing, lost and found love, and historical coincidence. Sure, it’s got the whole aging backward gimmick, but most people in the movie just kind of ignore it. The effects, though, are astounding. Little boy/old man Brad Pitt is a marvel, and I have no idea how they pulled it off. I was ready to scoff at crappy CGI/face putty, but its believable in nearly every frame. Kate Blanchette as an old dying woman, however, is just terrible, though they did an extremely impressive job of passing her off as college-aged.

Once the technical wizardy drops off, however, the movie languors in a mostly uninteresting romance between Pitt and Blanchette when their “real” ages meet. I think Fincher was trying to keep a large distance between the characters and the audience, perhaps as a reaction to the bombastically over-scored syrupy method of Forrest Gump and its ilk, but he might have gone too far, as both the leads are kind of uninteresting as adults. The final ten minutes or so, however, are oddly devastating as the little boy/old man Brad Pitt shows up with advanced dementia, driving the essential horror of the whole thing home.


That's all for now! I'm running out of awards fodder to wreck on but I've still got Frost/Nixon by the odious Ron Howard to watch, as well as Milk. Which I guess I'll get around to.

The American Viewing Public and Body of Film Critics are Wrong, Part 1

Part 1

We’re entering full swing the time of year where film studios push their tedious Oscar bait, film critics congratulate themselves on their good taste, and film audiences feel satisfied for spending money watching the films on top ten lists and aforementioned Oscar bait. Normally I’d ignore such things, as they don’t necessarily relate to the project of this blog, but hey, why not indulge myself in some end of the year smugness too?

With that said, I thought I’d approach the Best of/Worst of list business from a different angle: tearing down the misguided horse race for both categories. 2008 provides especially fertile grounds, as, probably due to the atrocious state of ‘serious’ films, box office winners and maudlin dramas have converged on the ‘official’ quality radar.

First up:

Wall-E



Wall-E sucks! And so does Pixar, for the most part. I had meant to stay out of the wider baffling world of of Pixar worship until a later date when I can comprehensively address the problem, but the frothing joy with which this film has been received by the masses has really chapped my ass.

I regard this film as a transparently obvious mechanism for guiding and dictating audience experience. It is the cinematic equivalent to a chimpanzee with electrodes wired into its brain to stimulate emotional centers to the brain.

Desired Response: Wall-E is super-cute, and would make a great toy, wouldn’t he?

Electrode: Wall-E capers and twitches and spazzes and beeps and stumbles!

Desired Reponse: Ah, that’s so sweet!

Electrode: Wall-E capers and twitches and spazzes out while pursuing female robot, accompanied by absurdly overbearing score.

Desired Response: This is exciting!

Electrode: Wall-E spazzes and beeps in a more alarmed manner, accompanied by an absurdly overbearing score.

Etc.

Not a moment of this film is genuine, and in its way demonstrates one of the most overzealous uses of exposition I’ve ever seen, very thinly coded through the standard Pixar response buzzers.

Other issues: Wall-E is a blatant rip-off of the Johnny Five robot from Short Circuit, compressed and cuted-up.

While the challenge of mounting a film with a silent protagonist is interesting, the filmmakers thought of nothing more creative than having the robot twitch and spazz out and hum and buzz in very close approximations to speech.

The human characters are awful both in terms of aesthetics and plot. They are ugly, boring, and an obvious sign that the writers really couldn’t think up a whole 80 minutes worth of non-verbal robot gags. Wall-E also displays a head-scratching level of internal discrepancy. They show video footage of real humans. But later humans are animated. This does not compute. This must be all or nothing, unless you’re Cool World.

The plant-in-a-shoe plot line is awkward and lame. Also, you can’t expose a delicate flower to the vacuum of space. It would freeze and shatter immediately. Also, space is a vacuum, there is no sound, but this does not stop Wall-E from spazzing and humming and buzzing.

You cannot have a messiah plot without someone ending up on the cross. Wall-E almost sacrifices himself, but of course the film doesn’t have the balls to follow through on its own obvious thematic premise.

The extended Earth Day credits sequence at the end is just plain embarrassing.

The pre-feature cartoon, Presto, was just as bad as the movie, and might even be more overwrought and annoying.

Leaning heavily on Hello Dolly for emotional punch is a road to nowhere.

Both the short film and feature combination of Presto and Wall-E are pathetic in the face of last-years phenomenal Ratatouille and alien abduction short.

So why are some critics listing this as the best picture of the year? I suspect it’s part of a broader infantilization of viewing audiences, particularly through the vehicle of Pixar deification. But that is a topic for another day.

Next at bat:

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire sucks! Unlike the Pixar machine, I don’t even dislike Danny Boyle. Granted Trainspotting is extremely overrated (though not bad), as are most mainstream “cult” films, but 28 Days Later is great, and parts of Sunshine are okay.

But Slumdog is a mess. This movie has been on the internet radar all year, and has suddenly rocketed to the front of the pack of Oscar contenders. Lord, does it beat me why. When I initially read about the premise of the film, which uses Who Wants to be a Millionaire as a frame device, I thought it sounded retarded. More recently, now that the film’s profile has skyrocketed, people are talking about wanting to see it. I always mention how bad the premise sounds. They agree, but still want to see it. Eventually I saw it, and was astounded at how accurate my initial reaction to the one line premise was; Slumdog Millionaire is retarded.

It’s difficult to describe how much of a pandering mess this film is. The game show premise is viscerally stupid, and never manages to even justify itself within the movie’s own plot. The story is a fractured pile of shallow flashbacks, that prevent us from ever really connecting to the adult age “main character,” who just sort of sits there and looks serious as he’s answering questions or being tortured. The “serious” pats come off as laughable, both as a result of the cloying India-riffic house music soundtrack and the absurd nature of the action. A kid falling into a lagoon of shit, and then triumphantly getting an autograph is supposed to inspire what, exactly? There’s a whole interlude with some evil orphan wranglers who in a sort of Pinocchio-esque manner teach the kids songs, and whoever sings the best . . . gets their eyes melted out! This should be horrifying, and I think it’s meant to be “serious,” but it comes off as a goofy Huckleberry Finn plot point.

Again, most of the screen time follows a pack of generic kids, and the rest follows the grown-up generic adults. There’s really nothing there establishing the eternal love between the protagonist and his lady, and her character is particularly shallow and actions inexplicable. It’s not clear why going on Who Wants to be a Millionaire is the best course of action. The plot device of the main character knowing every answer based on his life experience is incredibly tacky and stretched far beyond its limits. It makes no sense why slum children speak the Queen’s English as five-year-olds in a slum. The main character seems to have a slight British accent in the present. A good portion of the screen time is dedicated to people running through blurry environments at Dutch angles while shitty music plays, including an Indian techno song that sounds a lot like Paper Planes, Paper Planes itself, and an Indian techno remix of Paper Planes.

Why this is a critical darling is as arbitrary as anything else I suppose. Why did Crash win the Oscar? Beats the fuck out of me! I understand what Boyle was trying to do, marry the fairy tale qualities of a Bollywood epic with a grittier real-life tale of the slums, but what he comes up with is a ridiculous, cobbled together, joke of a movie, that commits the sin of pretension, attempting to mask its hollow component parts with an artsy/serious shellac that lends it a repugnant falseness. Just like Casino Royale!


And now:

The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is a good movie. Very good, even. But it does not deserve the top spot on a top ten list, nor a best picture Oscar. (Although best picture winners rarely do, so The Dark Knight winning would at least be novel.) Heath Ledger probably deserves the best supporting actor Oscar, as his work is mesmerizing. Which is part of Knight’s problem. The Joker, his ideology, and his actions are so much more compelling then anything else that’s going on that Batman and Two-Face are stodgy bores. And really, the film does such a good job making you love the Joker, that his inevitable defeat deflates the entire film. Nolan seems to sense this, as the final “showdown” between the Joker and Batman is utterly weak sauce. Earlier in the movie we had the Joker launching missiles from a moving truck and the Batmobile getting so badly damaged that it turns into a motorcycle. And for the finale we have the Joker hitting Batman with a pipe a couple of times, and Batman punching a couple of dogs. Boo. While I’m glad the Joker didn’t die on screen, he died off screen in real life and we shall never see him again. [I was in Soho the night it happened, meeting a friend after work. He occasioned to work right down the street, so we walked over to the scene, assuming that the hubbub was long over. We were wrong, arriving just in time to see them wheeling Heath out in a body bag. This was terrible. I got drunk that night, called in sick the next day, got a haircut, bought the Zurau Aphorisms, and went to the Bronx Zoo.]

There’s also the matter of the super lame double barge morality test thingy that’s suppose to serve as some major point of tension, but fails miserably, partially thanks to some of the worst featured extra performances this side of network television. The cellphone sonar stuff was also majorly lacking credibility. And while Aaron Eckhart was surprisingly good as Harvey Dent, Two Face was a waste. They made a seriously wrong choice with his stylization; they wanted to be Hardcore about it, but were committed to a PG-13 rating, so instead compromised with the silly looking Two Face we saw, with some of the visual effects of severe burn wounds without any of the unpleasant real-life accompaniments, making him look more silly than anything. A barely alive, mad-with-pain Two Face with putrefying burn wounds, a melted eye, and puss everywhere would have been something to see.

With this one I actually understand the critical attention, and even agree with a lot of it. Unfortunately I also agree with a common refrain: This is the Godfather II of superhero films; yes, in that it is largely overrated, and will remain so into perpetuity.


Check back for more aspersions on the taste of the American public!

Update:

I've received a comment! Midgard Dragon says:

"Wow, praise the most overrated film of the century (TDK was good, not great) and bash two great ones. And now for my total lack of respect: you're and idiot and everyone knows it.”

This is incorrect for several reasons. I expressly did not praise The Dark Knight. Midgard Dragon states that “TDK was good, not great.” The first two sentences of my statement are “The Dark Knight is a good movie. Very good, even.” It would seem Midgard Dragon and I are in agreement on the issue, though I can understand if he confused my ambivalent “very good” for “great,” though for future reference understand that and form of “good” always ranks below “great.” Furthermore, most of the section is dedicated to exploring the film’s faults as a means to demonstrate that it is not worthy of the Best of 2008 title. I’m beginning to suspect that Midgard Dragon did not read the post very closely. As for the “two great” films that I bashed, this is also incorrect; as the title of this post indicates, these films are actually bad. Very bad, even. Finally, Midgard Dragon’s formal expression of disrespect certainly loses power from the glaring typo in “you’re an idiot,” though he does gain points for using the proper “you’re.” This credit is largely undone through the low-level straw man argument of “everyone knows it.”