Tag: Robert Pattinson

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Film Features Film/TV

The Batman

Robert Pattinson is the Batman in The Batman.

Batman is the most capitalist of superheroes. Superman is an immigrant, raised by farmers, who moved to the big city to become a journalist. Spider-Man is from the urban working class, the first in his family to go to college, who struggles to pay the rent. Bruce Wayne is the scion of a billionaire family who never had to work a day in his life. He lives in a city plagued by squalor and poverty, but when he is personally affected by street crime, he doesn’t pledge a part of his vast fortune to improve the lives of the most wretched, but instead decides to spend a mint on weapons, dress like a bat, sneak around at night, and beat up people. 

This is not a new criticism of the most popular superhero of the last 30 years. In Watchmen, Alan Moore made his antihero Rorschach the mirror of Batman in every respect except one: He’s dog-food-eating poor. Stripped of Batman’s playboy persona and big house, Rorschach’s secret identity Walter Kovacs is a violent, paranoid vigilante obsessed with right-wing media. Bruce Wayne is not a hero — he’s a traumatized psychotic with messianic delusions whose violent tendencies are enabled by his great wealth. That’s not really the sympathetic framing you want for your comic book hero, especially now, when the pandemic has laid bare the oligarchs’ inhuman greed.

Director Matt Reeves does attempt to address that less than generous framing in The Batman. His Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) is a rich heir who lives in a Trumpian tower penthouse, but early in the film, Alfred (Andy Serkis) tries to get him to meet with the Wayne Corp accountants, who are apoplectic because of Bruce’s excessive spending and neglect of the core businesses. Bruce isn’t really into that capitalism stuff. He wants to be left alone to use his tactical bat gear and jet car to fight crime. Like Rorschach — and another psycho vigilante, Travis Bickle — we hear Bruce’s thoughts through his journal entries. 

Jeffrey Wright as Lieutenant Gordon, the last good cop in Gotham.

Gotham is plagued by a serial killer who is targeting the rich and powerful, beginning with the mayor. When Batman is called in to assist with the investigation by Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffery Wright) to investigate, Reeves teases out the Sherlock Holmes in the character’s DNA and lets Bats do some actual detecting. It seems the mysterious Riddler (Paul Dano) is leaving greeting cards addressed “To The Batman” at each crime scene. Bruce’s investigation leads him to Selena Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress braving crappy electronic music to work in a sprawling warehouse nightclub run by the Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell). “You have a lot of cats,” says the guy dressed as a bat when he breaks into her apartment. 

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman confronts the Bat-guy.

Turns out, Selena is plotting elaborate revenge on the crime boss Carmine Falcone (John Turturro). Is everyone in Gotham some kind of costumed maniac? Only the ones who aren’t cops on the take. The bat and the cat team up with Gordon to take down both a web of corrupt city officials (which included Bruce’s beloved dead father), The Riddler, and Falcone’s criminal syndicate. 

You might think that’s a lot to fit in a movie, but this one is 176 minutes long, so there’s plenty of time for too many bad guys, multiple false endings, and loving close ups of the Batmobile. Much of it works when taken on its own terms. Pattinson smears his eyeliner and broods with the best of them. The new Batmobile looks cool. Wright and Turturro own the screen. Dano is the best psychotic bat-villain since Jack Nicholson put on the Joker paint in 1989. 

But none of it can overcome the fact that this is yet another gritty reboot of Batman. Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne was an emotionally crippled PTSD case during the first Bush administration. His chemistry with Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman was electric. But instead of dripping weaponized sexuality, a chaste Kravitz Kubrick-stares her way through repetitive set pieces. How can you cast two of the sexiest people on the planet as forbidden lovers and create not a single spark on screen — even when one of them is armed with a taser? 

There’s a good two-hour film buried in this bladder-busting, three-hour mess. If it had climaxed with the crackerjack scene where Batman confronts an incarcerated Riddler, I’d be singing a different tune. Instead, The Batman cops out and goes on for another 45 minutes of generic henchmen punching. “Maybe this is the end of the Batman,” muses a disillusioned Bruce Wayne. We should be so lucky. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

This Week At The Cinema: Johnny Cash and Twilight

It’s the calm before the storm this week at Memphis movie theaters, as the end of October and the beginning of November bring two film festivals to the Mid South.

Wednesday night, Indie Memphis and Rhodes College presents Johnny Cash at Folsom, a documentary by Bestor Cram. Cash’s 1968 comeback album, recorded live in front of a captive audience at the infamous Folsom Prison in California, became an all time classic of American music. This film tells the remarkable story of how the record came to be, and the lives it touched in the 50 years since. The show will start at 7 p.m. at McNeil Concert Hall, and tickets are available at the Indie Memphis website.

This Week At The Cinema: Johnny Cash and Twilight

Then on Thursday, Oct. 18, comedian Michael Jr.’s stand up comedy special More Than Funny: Everyone Has A Punchline plays for one night at the Malco Paradiso and Collierville theaters. Take a look at some of Michael’s punchlines here.

This Week At The Cinema: Johnny Cash and Twilight (2)

At the Paradiso on Sunday, Oct. 21 at 2 p.m., the enormously popular Twilight series celebrates its 10th anniversary. It’s the franchise that launched the careers of actors Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, both of whom have grown into great actors since their start as lovelorn young girl and lovelorn ageless vampire.

This Week At The Cinema: Johnny Cash and Twilight (3)

See you at the movies! 

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Film Features Film/TV

The Lost City of Z

In the beginning of The Lost City of Z, Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), an officer in the British Army, gets notice that he is being called from his sleepy post in Ireland to an uncertain mission of exploration in South America. “It will be a grand adventure,” he is told.

Fawcett had experience as a cartographer and had traveled “all around the empire,” sometimes as a spy. Bolivia and Brazil were on the verge of war over a border dispute, so, to keep the peace, the British were sending Fawcett to map out the full extent of the border by finding the source of the Rio Verde. The catch was the “green river” got its name because it ran straight through the heart of the Amazon jungle. He and his team of surveyors were being sent where no man had ever gone before.

Once he’s in country with his team, Corporals Costin (Robert Pattinson) and Manley (Edward Ashley), Fawcett discovers that the part about going where no man has gone before is not strictly true. At best, he’s going where no white man has ever gone before. As he and his crew struggle up the river, an Amazonian guide tells him that the jungle was once home to an ancient civilization that was, in its day, the equal of the great cities of Europe. It was a place of “gold and maize” now lost to the encroaching jungle.

Fawcett soon learns the harshness of the jungle. Almost immediately, the confident Englishman starts losing members of his expedition to native arrows, piranhas, and, worst of all, infection and disease. But Fawcett was more stubborn than the jungle, and he finds the idyllic falls where the river begins. While they’re surveying the site, he stumbles across a cache of pottery shards in what should be a trackless forest. He takes the artifacts to be proof the tribesman was telling the truth.

Thus begins an obsession that will last the rest of Fawcett’s life, bringing him fame and fortune but costing him everything. In a raucous meeting of the Royal Geographical Society, he proclaims that the “savages” of the jungle are “made from the same clay” as white men. He will return to the Amazon to find evidence of the ancient lost city, which he calls Z — only he pronounces it “zed,” because he’s English and all.

That the meetings of geographical societies used to be such animated affairs is one of the revelations of James Gray’s film. Another revelation is that Gray has amazing classical chops. Old school film grammar evolved for a reason, to tell complex stories visually, and with emotional heft. The Lost City of Z is a testament to the contributions of masters like David Lean. His visual compositions import information clearly and efficiently while also being quite beautiful in the process.

Other recent obsessive, man-vs.-nature stories, such as Iñárritu’s The Revenant, are hyper-focused on the details of the task and toll of surviving in the wilderness. Gray, who also wrote the screenplay, lets us know not only the harrowing difficulties Fawcett faced in the jungle, but also the man he was back home. Our hero spends almost as much time with his wife Nina Fawcett (Sienna Miller) in England as he does in the Amazon. Nina is the long-suffering mother of three who keeps the hearth warm through her husband’s long absences. Fawcett is obsessed with finding the lost city but also acutely aware of the emotional toll his obsession has on his family and himself. Gray wants to make Fawcett into T. E. Lawrence — trapped between worlds, driven by impulses he doesn’t fully understand — and Hunnam rises to the occasion as best he can. Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia wore his heart on his sleeve, while Hunnam’s Fawcett is a strictly stiff-upper-lip type.

The subtext running through the story is the English establishment’s unquestioned philosophy of white supremacy and how that clashes with Fawcett’s observations. The issue comes to a head when World War I breaks out just as the explorer is returning from an unsuccessful expedition, and Fawcett is drafted to lead a battalion into battle. Next to the scenes of industrialized slaughter in the Somme, the kindly cannibals of the Amazon seem pretty civilized.

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Film Features Film/TV

Film Review: The Rover

For films and literature about dystopian societies, there’s no better setting than England (Nineteen Eighty-Four, Children of Men, Never Let Me Go, Brave New World, A Clockwork Orange, V for Vendetta…). But when it comes to post-apocalyptic locations, the place to (not) be is Australia (on the strength of Mad Max and The Road Warrior and even Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome alone, not to mention the classic On the Beach and Tank Girl). Perhaps it’s the way Australia already seems like a post-apocalyptic place, with its natural wasteland scenery of the Outback, its racially and ethnically troubled society, and its mondo-poisonous animal kingdom. Plus, the events of the pre-apocalyptic film The Last Wave could take place tomorrow, and it wouldn’t be a bit surprising.

Add The Rover to the antipodean eschatological list. The film, starring Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, takes place Down Under “ten years after the collapse.” Eric (Pearce) goes into a way station in the middle of nowhere to get something to drink. A group of outlaws (Scoot McNairy, David Field, and Tawanda Manyimo), on the run from a violent robbery, wreck their truck and steal Eric’s car. Eric, desperate to recover his car for unknown reasons, goes in hot pursuit. A man the criminals left behind for dead, Rey (Pattinson), is grievously injured but goes on the chase as well. Eric and Rey find common purpose but have disparate agendas.

The script (David Michôd and Joel Edgerton) is assembled in deliberate, stripped-down fashion. Each plot thread comes together slowly but surely. The film drives right into the story, then explains its world slowly and only partly. Brief bouts of dialog punctuate long stretches of silence. As director, Michôd’s long takes consider the land and the survivors’ place in it. Antony Partos’ spare, foreboding, primal score takes up instruments seemingly one at a time: percussion, piano, euphonium, bass, tin whistle.

Post-apocalyptic Australia, with car chases over endless, uninhabited highways, concern over the price of petrol, a plot fueled by vengeance, a violent, once-civilized loner you root for in spite of yourself: No, it’s not one of George Miller’s Mad Max films, though there’s no reason you couldn’t pretend it’s an unacknowledged prequel. That said, The Rover is more Mad Max than The Road Warrior. The harsh action is closer to the brutality of the original than the gonzo sequences from its sequel. (And, it must be noted, Eric drives a sedan, not a DIY armored supercharger.) Emotionally, too, The Rover mimics the existential angst of Mad Max.

In fact, The Rover may be the most depressing, black-mooded film seen in some time. I think I recall one moment of levity, in the first five minutes, before the shape of the movie came into focus. Michôd and company challenge you to keep pulling for Eric amid his relentless, Ahabian quest for his car. He takes no prisoners who don’t serve his purpose. You’ll pull for him because we are inculcated to cheer for the protagonist. But The Rover, when all is said and done, retroactively positions Eric less antihero and more … well, someone both more and less sympathetic than he appeared.

The script paints the mourning at the core of The Rover, and cinematographer Natasha Braier proves the point: Eric and Rey, after the fall, face to face in a dry and waterless place. “If you don’t learn to fight, your death is going to come real soon,” Eric warns Rey. Hilarious!