A Trilogy Rises in the End

The third movie in a trilogy often becomes an embarrassing mush.  Along with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 and Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand, think of Coppola’s The Godfather: Part III.  The only good that came out of that movie was that Sophia Coppola moved behind the camera, and has become a fine director.  The Lord of the Rings trilogy was an exception, because of its strong source material and Peter Jackson’s filming it as one huge movie.

The good news is that The Dark Knight Rises is another exception to the “3^rd Times the Harm” rule.  It is a fitting conclusion for the series.

The movie begins with an action sequence even more thrilling than the bank robbery in The Dark Knight.  A CIA agent (Aiden Gillen) and his crew of paramilitary operatives take custody from a local warlord of a rogue nuclear physicist, Dr. Pavel (Alon Aboutboul) as well as three hooded men who supposedly work with a terrorist named Bane (Tom Hardy).  While in flight, the CIA’s plane is literally hi-jacked by Bane’s operatives in order to get Dr. Pavel, for whom Bane has plans.

In Gotham City, it has been 8 years since Batman rode off into the dark after taking the blame for the crimes that Harvey “Two-Face” Dent committed.  In that time Gotham has been freed from much of the crime that had plagued it, thanks to draconian laws passed in Dent’s name that have filled the city’s jail.  Every year the anniversary of Dent’s death is a time for celebrating the DA’s supposed sacrifice, including a gala garden party held on the grounds of the rebuilt Wayne manor (after it was destroyed in Batman Begins by Ra’s al-Ghul and the League of Shadows).

In those 8 years, Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has become a Howard Hughes’ figure, a hermit locked away in his mansion, mourning his lost love, Rachel Dawes.  Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) has paid a price as well; his family deserted him as a consequence of his covering up of Dent’s crimes.  He’s asked to give a speech at the garden party about the real Harvey Dent.  Gordon pulls out notes which tell the truth, but thinks better of it.  A business colleague of Wayne’s, Miranda Tate (Marion Cottilard), tries to meet with him during the party, but Alfred (Michael Caine) rebuffs her efforts.

Inside Wayne Manor, Alfred directs one of the catering staff to take a food tray to a locked wing of the mansion, unaware that she’s Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway), a burglar known as the Cat-woman.  Wayne interrupts her as she’s taking an heirloom necklace from the safe.  His previous adventures have taken a toll on his body, and Selena is able to escape, picking up a congressman on her way out.  Afterward, Wayne finds fingerprint dust on the safe.  Apart from the necklace, Selina has stolen his prints.

When the body of a youth is washed out of a storm drain, policeman John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) recognizes the boy as a former resident of the orphanage where Blake was raised.  After talking with Blake by the smashed Batman signal on the roof of police headquarters, Gordon promotes Blake to his assistant.  Selina meets her contacts to give him Wayne’s fingerprints in exchange for her fee, but she finds she’s being double-crossed.  She pulls her own double-cross and brings Gordon and the police racing to the scene.  The hoods escape into the sewers.  While following them, Gordon is captured by Bane, who’s living beneath the city with his gang.  Gordon manages to escape, but is shot in the process.  Blake has figured out Batman’s identity, and he barges in on Wayne, forcing Wayne to return to the world of the living.

Christopher Nolan had always viewed his Batman movies as a trilogy, and that vision has paid off in a final chapter that is not only strong in itself but also wraps up themes and pays off moments from the first movie.  The screenplay by Nolan and his brother Jonathan (based on a story developed by Nolan and Batman Begins co-writer David Goyer) expands on The Dark Knight to create a fully-rendered world.  Nolan had decided, after the death of Heath Ledger, to not mention The Joker in this movie.  Rises is so full on its own that you won’t even notice the omission.

As with the previous movies, the acting is sterling.  Bale, Oldman and Caine layer onto their characters the regrets and pain accrued in the previous two movies.  The new characters, and the actors playing them, blend seamlessly into the Batman world.  It helps that Hardy, Cottilard, and Gordon-Levitt worked with Nolan on the twisty, fascinating Inception.  Hardy embraces the anarchy of Bane, an erudite ‘roid rager extraordinaire.  Gordon-Levitt has the thankless task of playing a straight arrow, but he pulls it off beautifully and believably.  Cottilard offers a possible salvation for Bale’s Wayne, both on a business level as well as emotionally.

The opposite side of Cottilard’s coin is Anne Hathaway’s Selina Kyle.  Catwoman has been both fascinating and frustrating in previous incarnations.  You have the campy purr-formances of Lee Meriwether and Eartha Kitt in the 1960’s Batman series and movie (Julie Newmar originated the role, and was the best of the three).  In 1992’s Batman Returns, Michelle Pfieffer was mesmerizing.  2004’s Catwoman expanded on the character’s backstory from Batman Returns, but the film was an embarrassing mess.  Now Nolan has raised the bar for the character, just as he did with Batman in Batman Begins.  There’s a depth we’ve not seen before, and Hathaway embodies it beautifully.  (She has said she’d be interested in doing a spin-off for the character, if Nolan would be involved; here’s hoping that will happen.)

The movie runs 12 minutes longer than The Dark Knight, but if anything you’ll be sad to see it end.

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I’ve kept any mention of the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado until now because I don’t want to give any greater place to the madman who perpetrated that horrible crime.  Christian Bale showed a grace beyond what we often see when he and his wife quietly visited with the victims, first responders, doctors and nurses a few days after the shootings.  My prayers are with the many that were injured, and the families of those who lost loved ones.  But I choose to end by remembering three men: Jon Blunk was a security guard who’d served 8 years in the Navy, and was in the process of re-enlisting, hoping to become a SEAL.  He was 25 years old.  Alex Teves, 24, had served as a mentor at the University of Arizona near his hometown of Phoenix as well as at the University of Colorado.  Matt McQuinn, 27, had just moved to Colorado from Ohio with his girlfriend.  All three men gave their lives to save others, using their bodies as shields.  The Dark Knight Rises extols the virtue of heroes taking a stand to protect others from evil.  Jon, Alex, and Matt showed the reality of such heroism in their sacrificial act.

“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”                                                                                                                             John 15:13

Summertime Line Up

The summer movie season first began back in 1975, when Jaws made the theater the place to be in June, July and August.  Two years later, Memorial Day Weekend became the starting date of the season with the release (on May 25^th, 1977) of a little film called simply Star Wars.  Since that time summer has been the time for blockbuster movies while in the fall movies aim for Oscar gold.  There are exceptions, but that’s the general rule.

This year the season started three weeks early, with the release of The Avengers.  It’s now grossed well over a billion dollars worldwide, and become the 4^th highest grossing movie in US history.  It also capsized a Battleship and drove a stake through Dark Shadows’ heart.  This weekend, Men In Black III comes out.  Will it be more successful fighting aliens than The Avengers?  We’ll see.  For the rest of the summer, there are a number of movies I’m anxious to watch.  Let’s start with the elephant on the schedule…

The Dark Knight Rises:  After George Clooney’s major misstep with Batman and Robin, the series looked brain-dead.  Then Christopher Nolan worked his magic and resuscitated Bruce Wayne with the intelligent, inventive Batman Begins.  The second installment in his trilogy, The Dark Knight, had a complexity and depth beyond any other superhero movie to that date.  With its stellar cast and Heath Ledger’s amazing performance as the Joker, it set the bar for the genre.  Now, with The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan has added to the cast three veterans of Inception (Tom Hardy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt & Marion Cotillard) along with Anne Hathaway as an uncampy Catwoman.  Can you say two billion-dollar movies this summer?  I knew you could.

 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:  With a cast that includes Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson and Bill Nighy, directed by John Madden, this may be the anti-summer movie – an English comedy set in India.  Like sorbet, it could be the perfect choice for cleansing your palette.

Brave:  Only a few movies have the confidence to simply show a scene from the movie as its trailer.  Brave showed that bravery, presenting an archery contest that was magical.  This is Pixar’s first female hero after a dozen hit movies.  It looks like they’ve hit the bull’s-eye.

Prometheus:  Ridley Scott has made two science fiction movies, both of them seminal films: Blade Runner and Alien.  Now he’s made a third.  With Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron and Michael Fassbender, it should be amazing.

Rock of Ages: Tom Cruise as a 1980’s hair band rocker?  This one’s a bit iffy for me.  It is based on a Broadway musical, and Cruise can surprise.  We shall see.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World: If the world’s going to be incinerated by an asteroid, getting to spend your last hours with Steve Carell and Keira Knightley sounds like a good idea.

The Amazing Spider-Man: Spider-Man 3 destroyed the goodwill generated by the first two Tobey Maguire movies.  Watching him do his Saturday Night Fever strut along the New York City streets was truly cringe-worthy.  Now we have a reboot with Andrew Garfield wearing the red and blue tights.  The director Marc Webb has mostly done TV and video, but his one movie credit is the delightful and inventive (500) Days of Summer.  This movie also features Emma Stone (always a plus) as Gwen Stacy, and Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May.  Perhaps this is Spidey’s Batman Begins.  I hope so.

Savages:  Third time’s the charm?  Taylor Kitsch has starred in two mega-bombs in just six months, John Carter and Battleship.  He must be feeling shell shocked by now.  Here though, he’s under the direction of Oliver Stone, with a supporting cast that includes John Travolta, Benicio Del Toro, Blake Lively, and Selma Hayek.  The movie also cost only $48 million to make, a fraction of the budgets for Kitsch’s bombs.  Here’s hoping.

Neighborhood Watch:  Last year, a small-budget English film called Attack the Block made a major splash with its story of a London youth gang fighting an alien invasion.  Now Hollywood has taken the rough premise and made a comedy.  A group of volunteer crime fighters try to defeat alien invaders, with Vince Vaughn, Ben Stiller and Jonah Hill saving the day.  This is another iffy one for me, but I’ll reserve judgment for now.

Ruby Sparks:  In 2006, the directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris made the off-off-beat and delightful Little Miss Sunshine.  Now they’re back with a story of a novelist whose character, his dream woman, comes to life.  While the Pygmalion legend goes back to the ancient Greeks, it’s still a good story, as George Bernard Shaw and Lehner & Loewe would attest.

Total Recall:  Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 over-the-top sci-fi adventure, starring Ah-nold himself, was popular.  Now Len Wiseman (Live Free or Die Hard) returns the story to its roots, Philip K. Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.”  The cast (Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, Bryan Cranston, John Cho, Jessica Biel) is first rate.  Dick’s imagination is responsible for Blade Runner, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly.  Going back to the source material seems like a very good plan.

The Bourne Legacy:  The original three Bournes completely remade the visual style of the spy movie, with intense action captured by handheld cameras and sharper cuts than a samurai sword.  (Casino Royale learned the new form and gave James Bond his best film in decades.)  With Matt Damon passing on a fourth movie, Universal turned to Tony Gilroy for help.  Gilroy wrote the first three movies, and he also wrote and directed Michael Clayton as well as the twisty Julia Roberts/Clive Owen industrial espionage movie, Duplicity.  Gilroy opened up the story, focusing on another assassin from the Treadstone project who goes rogue.  With Jeremy Renner, Rachel Weisz and Edward Norton joining Joan Allen, David Stathairn and Albert Finney from the previous movie, this team is definitely not second-string.

Hope Springs:  Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones as a married couple undergoing counseling from Steve Carell, under the direction of David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada)?  That’s enough to get me into a theater seat.

Lawless:  Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf play Prohibition-era bootleggers battling a villainous G-man played by Guy Pearce.  The story is based on a historical novel, “The Wettest County in the World,” that had a strong element of real history in it.  With Gary Oldman, Jessica Chastain, and Mia Wasikowska also in the movie, it’s a 100 proof cast.