and a bit more of my spontaneous christian bale film festival

the Prestige: (2006. dir: Christopher Nolan) In the opening shot, the camera pans silently across a forest floor cluttered with top hats. Bale's soft voiceover asks, "Are you watching closely?" In the final shot, we dolly away from a dead man through a burning basement filled with glass tanks, Michael Caine's voiceover explaining that we don't see the secret because we don't really want to see it. They're two brilliant endpieces, and between them lies a masterful piece of storytelling. The less you know about it going in, the better. I will say, though, that even if he'd never made another film, Nolan would still have my unwavering attention just for this.




Mary, Mother of Jesus: (1999. dir: Kevin Connor) Another uninspired, paint-by-numbers nativity. This one was Catholic-backed, by the Shriver family, I think, and it got some press for being a little scandalous, possibly because Mary has a second son in it. I guess that's why these Lives of Mary are so dull, because it's so easy to offend folks. The good news about this one is that Jesus is Christian Bale; the bad news is he's kind of a mama's boy. It's a bit of a maternal fantasy, in fact. Mary gets a lot credit: the parables, for instance, are stories that she told Jesus at his bedside as a boy, and it's only through his mother's continued prompting that he bothers to turn the water into wine at the wedding. Since we follow Mary we miss out on many of the incidents one looks for... a particular supper, for instance, or that forty days in the desert, or a certain agony in a certain garden. A nice touch is that Jesus looks drawn, haunted, and sickly from the time he embraces his calling through much of his ministry, exactly as you might do if you'd taken on a job that only you can do and upon which the well-being of the entire earth throughout history depends.

spontaneous christian bale film festival

Equilibrium: (2002. dir: Kurt Wimmer) Ridiculous but interesting faux-Matrix stab at Orwellianism. Emotion has been outlawed in this futureworld in attempt to save mankind from self-destruction. In pursuit of this end, indulgence in art, music, literature, and all things beautiful is proscribed and punishable by execution, and all citizens are required to take continuing doses of an emotion-numbing drug. The silly bit is that any little kid (or Sartre) could tell you that it's OTHER PEOPLE who rouse up emotions of all kinds, and any attempt to quell passion is doomed to failure unless everyone is quarantined into constant solitary confinement. The story doofs around looking pretty harebrained most of the time: Bale is John Preston, virtuoso of the gestapo in charge of tamping down all that crazy emoting, until his partner crosses over to the emote-y side, and then he meets a girl... et cetera...

BUT... and here's the good part... somewhere inside the silliness and "gun kata" (don't ask) is a really beautiful heart. The section of the film in which Preston stops taking his drugs and rediscovers beauty and sensation is absolutely stunning, a tribute to both Bale's performance and the artistry of the filming. A gesture as simple as removing a glove to feel the balustrade as he walks up a staircase becomes more sensuous than most love scenes. And imagine the power of going your whole life without music, then suddenly hearing Beethoven. I'll own the DVD, just for that twenty minutes or so of epiphany.




American Psycho: (2000. dir: Mary Harron) This might have been a good film, judging by its production values, had it been based on a story--even the same story--as written by, say, JD Salinger, or Joss Whedon, or you, dear reader. Had you written the source material for this film, it might have been a decent view. We will never know, because in fact it was written by Brett Easton Ellis, whose stories are all, always, about Brand Names, the Names of Hip Places to Hang Out, and the Names of Celebrities. The vapid and loathesome characters who "people" his stories (I use the term loosely) exist for the sole purpose of speaking these sacramental words. Because this director has stuck by Ellis in his primary purpose (to hold lovingly to the light and admire the very shallowness for which he feigns disdain) what little story there is disintegrates into a stumbling idiocy of loose ends. Important characters vanish without sound or reason, just as does the mounting and gruesome evidence for the titular psycho's crimes, seemingly via Deus Ex Machina. Ellis' point seems to be that here in the shoals of our frivolous society, humans are entirely interchangeable, but the result is a sophomoric punchline instead of an ending.

For many years a child star in Britain, this is the movie that propelled Bale's full-grown adult potential for superstardom across the water, and it speaks well of him that he's turned down offers to do sequels.




the Machinist: (2004. dir: Brad Anderson) This one goes in a category I call Night Sea-Journey films, a strange, narcotic little piece that is half-dream, half-reality, and you don't know until the end which half is which. (Filed also in this category I keep Siesta and Jacob's Ladder, along with some Cronenberg titles, Naked Lunch, Existenz and Spider among them.) Night Sea-Journey films require a greater commitment toward suspension of disbelief than most, and the burden on the filmmaker is greater to bring the ends in to an ultimately satisfying design. The Machinist is very much a success in this respect, and the performances by Bale (skinny as a whippet) and his costars are compelling. It's also extraordinarily difficult to watch, like being caught in that grinding, exhausting sort of nightmare from which you wake feeling sleepless and spent.

dark was the knight: my two belated cents on the batman

>WARNING: SOME SPOILERS<

I was raised in a strictly Marvel household. Spiderman came calling regularly, as did the Fantastic Four and Thor, who sometimes brought along his Avenger friends. Those DC fellows were verboten, considered relics from another era, somehow out of touch with the modern world. Then, in 1986, DC and Frank Miller unleashed the Dark Knight Returns on the world and it was like an earthquake. There was nothing out of touch about this wounded fisher-king of a superhero. Suddenly it was Marvel left looking quaint and a little shopworn.

It took me a long time to watch Batman Begins, largely because I couldn't get a lather up about anything with such a pedestrian title, but also because the buzz that it sprang up from Miller's Dark Knight mythos wasn't borne out by the trailers. The Dark Knight graphic novels are all about aging: the bitterness, guilt, loss of idealism, all while watching one's body begin to decay and fail. Bruce Wayne is 55 when they begin, and has been retired and drunk since the second Robin was killed in action. The wormwood encounters between the silver-haired Wayne and the ever-buff, never-aging Clark Kent are brutal, particularly since Kent is an unquestioning soldier of the American government, entirely lacking in Wayne's agonizing doubt and introspection. What did these questions have to do with the young and virile Christian Bale version of the Batman?

It's too much to say I was underwhelmed when I did finally watch it; more accurate to say I was merely whelmed. I enjoyed myself, but let my itchy trigger finger stray to the fast-forward button during the climactic action scenes and also, decidedly, during the final walk through the rubble of Wayne Manor, when Katie Holmes gives her "Oh, Bruce, maybe someday, but not today..." yawners.

The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has upped the intrigue in the whole Batman matter considerably. Sitting in the darkened cinema, watching the darkened Gotham, it struck me that this might grow into something more interesting than the original novels. It's the scapegoat thing that really sold me: the idea that the Protector of the City must be so strong that he can and will, voluntarily, carry the entire shadow of that city, forego the name of hero, be hunted as a villain, all for the good of the city's soul. That's exactly the kind of axiology one wants to find whilst grubbing in the nightsoil of the Dark Knight's Gotham, and Christopher Nolan doesn't let down the side.

It was a bold move on his part to de-hyperbolize the place itself. This is the first realistic Gotham City I've ever seen-- stylistically, it was exaggerated even in Batman Begins. And there are good reasons for using exaggeration. You watch those old "Batman" shows on TV, or the other movies, there's no question that we're not in the real world, so you don't ask things like, "How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" Now, suddenly, Gotham is a real city, in our real world, and nagging questions creep in, like, "OK. How the hell did the Joker manage to DO that?!" How do you plant thousands of bombs in the major hospital while the city is on a sort of terrorist red-alert and nobody notices until they go off? And If I tied up a soldier and stole his uniform to sneak into the Mayor's honor guard... again, while the city was on red alert for just such an incident in that very place... Well, I wouldn't get very far, even WITHOUT huge telltale scars on my face announcing exactly who I was. Things like that. Old Bruce pulls off near-miracles, too, but it's easier to shrug off. He is richer than Croesus, and rich folks with geniuses on the payroll can do stuff, end of story, or so those of us who scratch out a living day to day are prone to believe.

Most of the problems I had with the film concerned the Joker, in fact. Here's a fellow who claims to be the opposite of a schemer, the anti-schemer, the big spontaneous trickster guy without a plan, but he has HUGE plans (granted, he's also a big fat liar). Somehow his plans get carried out in spite of the fact that although his organization of petty criminals must be enormous, he has no right-hand guy, nobody he trusts... And yet he manages to keep complete control of these guys? Terror is a good discipline, certainly, but one guy? without backup? Hitler and Stalin and Capone had inner circles. All dictators and crime-bosses do. Nobody manages to stay on top of a criminal organization without trusted troops to do the wetwork... and, although the Joker is not one to shy away from the wetwork, there's no way he could do it all, not in an operation this size.

In the end, these are minor itches, and there are more things I love than hate about this Dark Knight: the script, its reversals and surprises, for starters. I even liked the car chases this time. I love Alfred's story about the Burmese jungle. I love Harvey Dent's speech about Rome and its protector, and I love the full and tragic human they've made out of Two-Face. I love the big thumpy music they play during some of the action scenes. I love the convict on the ferryboat who offers to bear the shadow for the whole boat, much as Batman will for the whole city. I've had to go back and watch it three times to decide finally, but I think Nolan has pulled off a triumph, one that might lead to increasingly wonderful sequels if he can keep his interest up. Even one, perhaps, when Bale is 55, playing a man who has been retired and drunk for ten years...

post-punk: radio on

Music feels sometimes like a gateway, or a catalyst for magic, particularly when you're young. I suspect there are few from any generation since vinyl came readily available that have not had at least a spell of their teenaged lives that was outlined, defined and painted into deep and velvet colors by the music of are what I was looking for, unless it was Adventure or God.

Radio On (1980. dir: Chris Petit) is a film that rises up out of that sensibility. Robert (David Beames) is a DJ so alienated from the world we not only never see him touch anyone, including the girlfriend who is leaving him and the German girl he picks up on the road ("Last night I thought we would have sex," she tells him, "but today I know that we won't,") he never manages to have a fully engaged conversation. This is the story--if you can call it that--of his road-trip through the bleak countryside of England as the snarling '70s were turning into the MTV '80s. Looking like a fellow that Paul Weller might hire to play keyboard for the Jam, he lives a nocturnal existence working at a tiny radio station, one of those DJs who so cares about music that he does annoying things like playing Ian Dury's "Sweet Gene Vincent" when someone has requested "Whatever Gets You Through the Night", because it's "better". (Hogwash. Not only is "Sweet Gene Vincent" not better than the simple but invigorating Lennon song, it's not even the best track on New Boots and Panties! Rant over; carry on.) His brother is dead under strange circumstances and he drives down to Bristol, ostensibly to check into it, but he never really does, not much. The death apparently had something to do with a rash of murders among a ring of pornographers, but those ends are left dangling, as are all others. This film is not about its story but about a sort of equal-parts bleak and joyous post-punk nihilism, and it survives across the years better than some of its more outre counterparts like Derek Jarman's ridiculous and cringe-worthy Jubilee from 1977, and probably better than my then-favorite, a little Susan Seidelman film called Smithereens which I haven't seen since it opened in 1982 but which I loved very sincerely at the time.

It is almost 1980 and the ferocious and fleeting moment of punk has flattened out into the electronic drone-pop of Kraftwerk, Lene Lovich, Devo, that sort of nowhere music which seemed interesting and odd at the time but was never designed to rouse one into greater life or passion. In fact, in one of the two spirited moments in the movie, Robert meets a petrol station attendant (played by Sting) who speaks with enthusiasm about his idol, Duane Eddy, but whose exuberance turns into a grimace when he hears the Kraftwerk on Robert's tapedeck.

It's an aimless and existential black-and-white ramble, less pretentious than most which answer to that description, and it captures a moment in time rather well. It evoked in me a nostalgia for that very alien and now lost England, before there was a Starbucks on every corner and the Millennium Bloody Eye scarred the landscape, back when you could no more find a well-made coffee than you could veg or decent condiments for your burger, but you could find a culture so different from the American that it was like, well, a foreign country.

The film's best bit is the opening, before we've met Robert, when the camera takes a leisurely look on its own around the dead brother's flat, focusing on a view out a window here, a photo and a bit of paper here, just a glimpse of the bathtub and its inhabitant there, and all the while David Bowie is singing the English/German version of "Heroes" in its entirety, a perfect song, one of the most buoyant songs ever recorded, joyful and tragic all in the same moment. And, as in the rest of life, it all flattens out a bit from there, because who can sustain perfection like that? Not even Bowie.