As the title suggests, so forth.
The Batman Revisited
Before it left Netflix recently I took the opportunity to give The Batman a second viewing, having suffered thru the first encounter with its gargantuan length. Two thoughts predominated. First, it is too damn long. An entire thirty minutes could be cut out with very little damage. Second, Paul Dano is just as bad as I’d thought. His Riddler is an awful performance. He is insanely over the top, but without any trace of joy. He sing-songs and randomly shouts his words like he’s doing Nicolas Cage doing the Riddler. But I can say with certainty Simon Helberg on Studio 60 doing Nicolas Cage doing the Riddler would be a better performance. I came to like more and more the ponderous nature of Michael Giacchino’s Bat-theme, even if it seems like he was deliberately trying to achieve the opposite of Zimmer and Howard’s endless ostinato. For some reason I also kept feeling that it was about to lurch into Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 2. But that may just be me. This time round I appreciated more what Zoe Kravitz was doing as Catwoman. However, it becomes ever more clear that Colin Farrell’s Penguin could be eliminated from the film with great ease, which is worrying, given how little he really does beyond justifying a Batmobile chase sequence and a moment straight out of 1960s Batman where Gordon and Batman realise the clue was beyond their awful knowledge of Spanish. But having not really had much of a lasting impression after the first marathon viewing, this time I was paying close attention to Robert Pattinson as the Dark Knight. And was quite impressed by his stoicism. I hadn’t noticed the first time round (because of all the hype about his emo eyeliner) that his Batman is given to standing, very still, and staring, very long, and that this unnerves the hell out of the people around him. He is self-possessed to a superhuman degree. He speaks when he needs to, acts as the situation requires, and relentlessly journals his day. Or rather his night. Pity there’s no sequel.
Who should play a man named Doll?
This has been occasionally bugging me since I read Jonathan Ames’ delicious slice of LA noir. I thought at first that this would be a great role for Robert Downey Jr, recapturing some of his Kiss Kiss Bang Bang energy, but in an older, sadder role. But then he mooched off for mucho money with a return to Marvel, God Help Us. So then who? Ames’ previous alter egos Jason Schwartzman and Patrick Stewart are no use in the part of a perma-stoned 6 foot ex-cop with an unfortunate habit of killing hired goons by the handful in a short space of time. Ryan Gosling? (In a few years?) Russell Crowe? It feels like this is something that Shane Black should be aware of. And yet, it also seems like it would be karmically wrong to ask Shane Black to direct something that is so well written already that it does not need his input as a writer.
What is the point of Shoah?
Claude Lanzmann died recently and so everyone was obliged to rave over his magnum opus Shoah. But what exactly is the point of Shoah? It purports to be a film, but it is 9 ½ hours long. The Israeli government withdrew their funding for his project when they realised that this man was incapable of bringing in a two hour documentary as requested. And quite right. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick used a TV series format for their recent documentary on the US and the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg kept Schindler’s List to 3 and a quarter hours. If the point of addressing the Holocaust is to raise awareness, to ensure it never happens again, and nobody ever sees your work because of your self-indulgence, then what was the point of tracking down and interviewing perpetrators? It’s not just likely, it’s demonstrably true that more people saw James Woods and Meryl Streep in The Holocaust in 1978 on American network television in the golden age of miniseries than have ever seen Shoah. Or probably will ever see Shoah. BBC Four tried to show it recently, and ended up splitting it in two, and broadcasting it mostly after midnight both nights. I want to watch Shoah. But the monumental difficulty of logistics of watching or recording it has thus far stopped me. So, again, why so much praise for a man who so very deliberately chose to make an unwatchable documentary on such an important subject?
Talking Movies 