{syvology...}

SYVEREVIEW: Pain & Gain

Tue, 07 May 2013 16:04:00 -0400

Michael Bay caught dismissive guffaws when he described his latest film as a “small character piece.” As absurd as that statement sounds coming from his lips, Bay was telling the truth. Pain & Gain takes a frantic look at some very twisted people, with minds deformed not only by steroids and supersets but by American pop mythology itself.

Nationalist imagery and references to the concept of the “American” permeate the film. The story’s pro/antagonists (who’s who?) engage in a vague debate about what is “American” and what is not. To Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg), America means hatching a brutal proletarian revolt drenched in capitalist blood. To Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), the victim of Lugo’s caper, America means his rags-to-riches immigrant journey, fraught with tax evasion and vile business practices.

Lugo is pumped and Kershaw is shrimpy. But on the inside, both think they’re Tony Montana.

From both sides of this crude dialectic emerges a truly American synthesis: The Virtue of Selfishness. This leads to a powerful moral ambiguity throughout the film, with reasonable viewers left wondering who -if anybody- there is left to root for.

Bodybuilding provides the film with a stunning metaphor. It’s a conceptually narcissistic hobby, in which one essentially competes against oneself. The lifestyle fosters obsession with personal gain and self-betterment through complex workout regiments, meal planning, and chemical supplementation.

But in a deeper sense, the essence of bodybuilding is a reified expression of gruff ambition, a physical analogue to the intangible American Dream. Even the scrawniest dweeb can build himself into a Greek God, rep by rep and protein shake by protein shake. If you think I’m crazy, recall the scene towards the end of The Great Gatsby, where they discover one of Jay Gatsby’s notebooks. His detailed, meticulous workout routines were no accident of characterization.

Structurally and visually, the movie feels a bit like an overdose on JACK3D. What starts as a high-energy adrenaline rush quickly devolves into a nightmarish struggle with reality. Conventional heist flick slowly turns to black comedy, and before you know it we’re watching the characters gleefully dismember corpses and barbecue body parts.

Inevitably, some viewers will either miss or ignore much of what this movie has to say about modern capitalist norms, amoral socialization, and the mythology of success and ambition in America. But at the very least, we have here a disturbing true story of despair, transgression, and systemic injustice. Bay’s concoction of characters are as warped mentally as they are physically, and their story serves as an expert satire of the way we treat each other -and the way we treat ourselves.

8.5/10

Podcast 4.2.13: My Chemical Romance, Lil Wayne. Bieber, and more!

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:06:19 -0400

shirtlesssymposium:

In this week’s episode the guys talk about the break up of My Chemical Romance and take a look back on the band’s body of work. They also discuss the latest album from rapper Lil’ Wayne (I Am Not a Human Being 2), the downward spiral of Justin Bieber, and offer a few thoughts on the tragic death of Shain Gandee.

New Zatanna Costume a Dr. Light Ripoff?

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:04:00 -0400

wtf? this is outrageous.

Avengers Vs X-Statix by Mike Allred Michael Allred is doing...

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 01:02:43 -0400

Avengers Vs X-Statix by Mike Allred

Michael Allred is doing some incredible stuff for Marvel as of late…

Podcast 3-10-13

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:57:00 -0400

This week the guys discuss Superman, Orson Scott Card, and the fine line between art and artist.

PODCAST 2-17-13

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 23:13:08 -0500

shirtlesssymposium:

With special guest Tim Tremba, the guys take a meandering look at the return of Justin Timberlake.

Download the FREE podcast HERE.

Happy Grammys Day!

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:54:46 -0500

Happy Grammys Day!

comicartappreciation: Big Barda // Art Adams(via Giant-Size...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:42:26 -0500

comicartappreciation:

Big Barda // Art Adams
(via Giant-Size Geek)

Transgender Identity and Superman's Pal

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:33:00 -0500

Rumor has it that in the upcoming Man of Steel picture, Superman’s lovable ginger bro won’t be a bro anymore. Although no formal announcement has been made, all signs point to Olsen’s character swapping genders. That’s right: no more Jimmy Olsen. From now on, it’s Jenny Olsen.

As to whether this is a good thing or not, an ever-concerned and engaged comic book community appears to be split right down the middle. On its face, I think it’s great that comic book entertainment is making an effort to include female characters other than damsels in distress and femme fatales. Female characters who are, you know, just people who are part of the story.

But more interesting is the bizarre and sexually ambiguous history of the Jimmy Olsen character itself. True, the character’s upcoming sex change may seem somewhat random and abrupt to most observers. But you’ll be intrigued to know that, in fact, identity experimentation, and specifically transvestism, is a well-grounded, but recently forgotten, feature of Jimmy Olsen’s characterization.

In classic 1950s Superman comics, the otherwise mediocre young man at some point acquired the ability to shape-shift. He’d cycle through various physical configurations, all the while struggling to “find” himself.

But truthfully, Jimmy Olsen’s favorite thing to be wasn’t an alien or a monster or a mutant.

It was a girl.

As noted comics writer and historian Grant Morrison puts it,

Jimmy Olsen could barely stand to be himself for more than five pages…Prefiguring David Bowie and Madonna, his life became a shifting parade of costume changes and reinventions of identity. And long before those two performers were challenging the boundaries of masculine and feminine, Olsen was deconstructing the macho stereotype in a sequence of soft-core gender-bending adventures for children that beggar belief when read today.

As Morrison suggests further, Jimmy’s overt experimentation with his sexual identity may be connected with a more obscure movement in the 1950s: transvestite erotic fiction.

According to the late Dr. Robert J. Stoller, psychoanalytic theorist at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic:

“[I]n all samples of this genre of transvestite pornography the fundamentals are the same: the heterosexual young man, unquestionably totally male, innocent, is captured by females who do so not by physical power but by the mysterious power inherent in femaleness and femininity. Humiliated, he is forced by them into women’s clothes…with the women’s help, the man’s humiliation is changed to a pleasurable non-erotic state, when the women openly accept him as a man, a male who has remained a man and a male but who looks pretty and graceful in women’s clothes.”

Indeed, to an interesting degree, Jimmy’s transvestism tracks this paradigmatic fantasy. Over and over, Jimmy is confronted by his own effete helplessness opposite Superman, the supreme masculine archetype. To cope, he finds one implausible excuse after another to put on a dress and makeup. Inexplicably, transvestitism was the recurring solution to the various challenges he faced. It’s simply his fascinating, perverse way of coexisting alongside Superman’s overwhelming machismo. And each time, as some of these examples show, Jimmy’s embracement of his female alter-ego was nothing if not vastly empowering.

While this all no doubt sounds far-fetched, consider for a moment that back in “the day,” often some of the same seedy characters involved in publishing comics were also involved in publishing pornography and erotic fiction. This was a natural, albeit disconcerting alliance, since back then both genres were marginalized, dingy sectors of the underground publishing community. Back then, it wasn’t the booming industry it is now. It was a relatively small group of weirdos.

Superman co-creator Joe Shuster himself was at one point employed by bondage illustrator Eric Stanton. Maybe that’s surprising. Then again, maybe it’s not surprising at all. Take a look at this Pinterest board to get an idea of how vibrant and ridiculous queer pulp fiction used to be. Comic-booky, to say the least.

Of comics, Grant Morrison says it plainly: “Clearly these stories were written by perverts with an intent to pervert the young. They were entirely successful.”

So when you hear people talking about stupid it is that they made Jimmy Olsen a girl in the new Superman movie, now you’ll know the truth. They didn’t change anything.

He’s always been a girl.

Oscar Grouch

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 18:09:56 -0500

With the nominees announced, and my opinions literally bursting from my chest, it’s time for me to weigh in. Here are my (generally) informed predictions for the 85th Academy Awards, our culture’s famously anachronistic and unfair method for determining filmic accomplishment.

Best Picture - Life of Pi

This category is as vexing as it is exciting this year. With an absolute deluge of contenders recently (half the nominees were released in the last month or so), this category almost seems wide-open. But think for a minute.

Zero Dark Thirty is easily the year’s highest-quality movie, but it won’t win for two big reasons. First, Kathryn Bigelow just won for The Hurt Locker in 2009, and is still riding high from its critical acclaim. (Traditionally, the Oscars aren’t necessarily about the end product. Rather, they’re about who the pompous insulated movie community feels “deserves” career recognition.)

Second, the Academy is likely weary about what my be perceived as an endorsement of the hallucinated political message of ZD30, i.e. that it somehow stands for the proposition that torture is awesome. The preposterousness of that view is heartbreaking, but it’s a reality that the Academy probably takes seriously.

This second concern applies equally to Beasts of the Southern Wild and Django Unchained. Both are just a bit too controversial, fairly or not. (see e.g. here and here.)

Meanwhile, enjoying Les Miserables, truly beautiful as it is throughout, depends in large part on your preexisting love for the material. While anyone with a pulse should be brought to the edge of tears by “I Dreamed a Dream,” I’m not confident a viewer with no prior knowledge of the book or musical could walk in to that movie and feel that it was all together a soundly structured, perfectly intelligible film. There are differences in form and convention between film and stage musicals, such that an A+ stage musical may make for a B+ film experience. So to the extent that Tom Hooper got pretty hardcore in his faithfulness to the source (stage) material, that may ultimately detract from its strength as a film qua film.

Silver Linings Playbook was my pick for a while after I first saw it. I truly loved this movie. But if you watch closely, there are unfortunate albeit nit-picky blemishes (like continuity gaffes, e.g. Pat walking in with his dancing shoes taped up, and then sitting down to tape up his shoes seconds later) that just kind of bring it down an imperceptible level. I’d be stoked if it won, and it’s Brett Easton Ellis’ pick. But I think the attributes that make it so endearing- its quaintness and exuberant naïveté - are simultaneously the attributes that make it a deserved nominee, but not a winner.

Lincoln seems to be many casual observers’ prediction, and understandably so. It was thorough and competent. But a conventional historical procedural designed to make proud informed Americans out of proud uninformed Americans doesn’t deserve an Oscar. And is anyone out there really anxious to adorn Spielberg any further? Could anyone really stomach it?

Argo was great, but not Best Picture material, particularly considering Affleck’s Best Director snub.

Amour is the only nominee I haven’t seen. If that wins, I won’t be alone in #SMH.

Finally, that brings us to Life of Pi. I don’t know too many people who have actually seen it. The trailer was too overwhelming, I think. But the few I know who did see it left the theater feeling like they had witnessed a vast cinematic accomplishment. I won’t gush. But this movie was jarringly beautiful, technically innovative, and deeply powerful. If you get a chance, just see it, and I think you’ll agree.

Best Actor in a Leading Role - Daniel Day Lewis, Lincoln

His performance was too cheesy for my taste, but the actor everyone worships playing the president everyone worships is a slam dunk.

Best Actress in a Leading Role - Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook

She’s one of the most versatile and hardworking female actors we have seen in a long time. She glows in every role she inhabits. When she was passed over in 2011 for her breakout role in Winter’s Bone, the craziest part was that everyone thought such a young relative unknown actually had a chance. After grinding for a few years in a host of diverse roles, she’s past due for some very deserved recognition. I’m excited.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role - Tommy Lee Jones, Lincoln

This category sucks this year, mostly because Leonardo DiCaprio deserves to win for Django and was somehow denied even a nomination. I thought Phillip Seymour Hoffman was actually not very good in The Master, and the Academy seems to have mostly seen through PT Anderson’s thickly pretentious charade. It was nice to see DeNiro get off his ass finally in SLP, but Travis Bickle has been dead and gone for a long, long time.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables

No discussion needed. The lock of all locks. The only other possible contender seems to be Amy Adams, who I personally found dreadfully miscast in The Master.

Best Animated Feature Film - Brave

Screw this whole category. (see The Case for Eliminating the Best Animated Feature Award.)

Best Cinematography - Life of Pi

You have to see it to believe it.

Costume Design - Lincoln

All I can remember from this movie actually is the ridiculous atire Mary Todd Lincoln slouched around in.

Directing - Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild

It takes incredible talent to somehow capture just how surreal Louisiana’s reality was during Katrina. And the performance he got out of Quvenzhané Wallis is nothing short of marvelous.

However, bear in mind that this category will eternally bear an enormous asterisk. I join those who are enraged that Kathryn Bigelow was snubbed, and add also my disdain for Ben Affleck being excluded. He’s an exceptional director, and I really thought this was his year.

Best Original Screenplay - Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom

This script was brave, delicate, and heartwarming. I waver on my appreciation for Wes Anderson, but this was his first truly perfect film. Possibly my favorite movie of the year. I’m disappointed that this didn’t get Best Picture or Director nods, but I’ll take what I can get.

Best Adapted Screenplay - David Magee, Life of Pi

The conventional wisdom about this book was that it was un-adaptable. Well guess what? It’s wasn’t.

Visual Effects - Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott, Life of Pi

LIKE NOTHING I HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE.

Film Editing - Dylan Tichenor and William Goldenberg, Zero Dark Thirty

Clean and tight editing was what made each and every act of terrorism feel completely terrifying and unexpected. Even when you just knew it was coming.

Remaining categories? Pass.

_____________

So that’s it. Disagree? Come @ me, bro.

Doctor Doom by Bob Layton

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 11:34:43 -0500

Doctor Doom by Bob Layton

BATMAN & ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE!

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 22:56:00 -0500

BATMAN & ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE!

This is everything I believe in.

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:50:35 -0500

This is everything I believe in.

Is Red She-Hulk a Blatant Ripoff of Purgatori?

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 16:55:00 -0500

SYVEREVIEW: Skyfall

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:37:51 -0500

I’m willing to bet the most popular comment you’ve heard about Skyfall so far is that it was “not as good as Casino.”

Perfect though Daniel Craig may be as Bond, at this point he and the franchise appear to be suffering from a condition that may fairly be called the “agony of success.” Since 2005’s incredible Casino Royale, Craig and the pair of subsequent directors he’s been with since have worked in its deservedly intimidating shadow. Casino’s own director, Martin Campbell, himself never recovered. Hailed as an invigorating visionary, he was saddled with impossible projects like making Green Lantern cool and accessible and resurrecting Mel Gibson’s action career with Edge of Darkness. And he failed somewhat miserably at both.

After the lukewarm, convoluted, and strangely forgettable Quantum of Solace disappointed so many, veteran Bond producer Barbara Broccoli (daughter of legendary original Bond producer Albert Broccoli) appears to have encouraged a “back to basics” approach with Skyfall. The plot is trite and familiar, the pacing is relatively leisurely, the characters are easily identifiable, and generally nothing is too confusing (although sometimes left deliberately unclear).

Director Sam Mendes gives us a crisp, impressive, and largely inoffensive action product, coupled with a deliberate but cautiously subdued effort at humanizing and psychologizing James himself. My favorite reviewer, Tom Carson at GQ, really dumped on the idea that James Bond should be written with any measure of emotion:

Who the hell wants James Bond to have a psychology?

…[Bond’s] whole pop-culture function defines the difference between identification and projection. We always wanted to act like him, sure; who wouldn’t? But we never wanted to be him, because there was no “him” to be.

While I find this to be a truly interesting excuse for keeping lowbrow entertainment lowbrow, I think after 22 installments and a half-dozen subtle variations on pure maleness, the need to keep Bond mysterious (read: one-dimensional) has long since evaporated. I’m not suggesting Bond go emo or anything, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a glimpse into who he is, where he came from, and what’s going on behind such an impossibly cool exterior. So I appreciated even the somewhat superficial attempts at depth we get here, like M being kind of a surrogate mother and the climactic violence at the end serving as cathartic release from vague “unresolved childhood trauma.” Or whatever.

The cast is so perfect, one wonders if anything enjoyable about the film would survive without them. Aside from the credible chemistry we see between Craig and Judi Dench, Javier Bardem has the time of his life playing the “malevolent homosexual” villain, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else anyone pulling off something so politically incorrect. Bérénice Marlohe is also excellent, exuding melancholy and reluctant beauty.

The film is competent and fun, and suffers from no shortage of great moments. At the same time, we’re not given even the mere pretense of real franchise/genre innovation here, and none of it feels very fresh. After all, “freshness” was what made everyone love Casino so much. In other words, what you’re hearing is indeed true: Skyfall isn’t half the movie Casino was. But on its own merits, the film is still quite good.

7/10

(Mis)Conceiving #ARTPOP

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 19:51:00 -0400

In an interactive chat with some of her more quasi-religious devotees the other day, Lady Gaga said she’s considering splitting her upcoming ARTPOP record into two separate volumes. One volume would be for the “commercial” stuff, and the other volume would be for the “experimental” material.

What an awful idea.

What’s so disappointing about this statement is the implicit suggestion that there is, or should be, any real difference between that which is commercial (the “pop”) and that which is experimental (the “art”). The conceptual poverty of segregating “art” and “pop” is not only the ostensible idea behind the album’s portmanteau title, but it is precisely the false dichotomy that Lady Gaga’s career was always meant to refute:

While Gaga has surely engaged in some creative apportionments in the past (half of The Fame may well have been initially intended as Britney Spears b-sides and the other half could only have come from her), her strength was never versatility per se; it was synthesis. Her music, and more prominently her visual aesthetic, is not compelling for its ability to shift gears between the popular and the avante-garde; it’s compelling for its ability to exploit a duality in the two.

The false dichotomy between “art” and “pop” is not limited to content. It extends to her career as well. Andy Warhol, no less than her essential creative antecedent, said it best:

“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.”

Since I naturally assume Lady Gaga is a regular reader of my humble blog, I have this message for her: You didn’t divide or hyphenate the title for a good reason, and you shouldn’t do the same thing to the music. Please don’t split ARTPOP in two.

SYVEREVIEW: Gorgeous Children (self-titled)

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 11:06:00 -0400

Previously, this blog exposed few and faithful readers out there to Face Vega, the mysterious and prodigious west coast rapper behind Black Lodge Vol. 1. Now comes Gorgeous Children, Vega’s brilliant collaboration with eccentric producer Gila Monster, and trust me: you wanna peep this.

&amp;lt;a href=”http://gorgeouschildren.bandcamp.com/track/olive-skin-2” data-mce-href=”http://gorgeouschildren.bandcamp.com/track/olive-skin-2”&amp;gt;Olive Skin by Gorgeous Children&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

Since I heard Vega’s album back in May, I’ve been legitimately addicted to his brand of creepy, thoughtful, unstoppably swagged out hip hop; and I gotta say, his latest work here has met, and somehow exceeded, my expectations. The lyrical content is as sharply disturbing as ever, and in many places his twisted locutions are even braver than they were on Black Lodge.

Gorgeous Children offers a more cohesive, fun product than Vega’s debut effort, which featured a dozen producers and at times was prone to abrupt stylistic fluctuations. As the record’s sole source of beats, Gila Monster’s menacing and woebegone instrumentals add perfect compliment and character to Vega’s engrossing nihilism. The whole thing feels fleshed out and deliberate, and you can tell these two guys really see eye-to-eye artistically.

Gorgeous Children won’t be for everyone; vague interest in the macabre or avante-garde is somewhat prerequisite. But I want to stress that this is not your average horrorcore shock-rap nonsense. Having practically grown up on that stuff, I can assure you that this isn’t Necro, or Cage, or Jedi Mind Tricks, or Ill Bill, or Odd Future, or any of that stuff.

It’s a unique take on dark rap, with a gully subtlety that sounds like nothing I’ve heard before.

So if you can bring yourself to absorb what’s going on here, I think you’ll agree with me that Face Vega raps at a level that can be fairly called astonishing.

I hope you give his stuff a listen, and buy the record (name your price).

&lt;a href=”http://gorgeouschildren.bandcamp.com/track/black-palms” data-mce-href=”http://gorgeouschildren.bandcamp.com/track/black-palms”&gt;Black Palms by Gorgeous Children&lt;/a&gt;

Quick Movie Reviews: The Master, Looper, & Argo

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 12:52:22 -0400

It’s been a while since I contaminated the internet with my vulgarly self-validating pop culture commentary, so I thought I’d take a moment to do just that.

As always, spoiler free.

The Master

I wasn’t disappointed, but I wasn’t pleased either. For some reason, it feels hard to form an honest opinion about this movie. Everyone sounds disingenuous when they talk about it, whether they’re gushing with obviously overblown praise or shitting on it with contrarian satisfaction. Somehow, both categories of opinion feel defensive.

The Master is an interesting specimen, insofar as it’s essentially bad movie made by a complete genius. The film is shot-through with PTA’s uncanny filmic talent, and the acting by Joaquin Pheonix is 100% gold. But notable as these strengths appear, they end up only incidental parts of a film that’s just not quite there.

Early on, the “informal processing” scene is admittedly breathtaking, and it’s truly the film’s high water mark. But after that, the film never again approaches such verve and emotion. Instead, it meanders through a series of frequently boring and overambitious devices that seem designed to outsmart and confuse even the most sophisticated (but firmly unpretentious) viewers. None of it is glaringly incompetent, but all of it feels dramatically undeveloped.

I thought Philip Seymour Hoffman was good, but he deserves nowhere near the credit he’s getting for such a straightforward role. Amy Adams on the other hand, of whom I’m generally no fan, was dreadfully miscast.

Nonetheless, I suppose “liked” the movie. But I can say for sure is that it’s clearly Paul Thomas Anderson’s worst movie.

And I haven’t even seen that first one.

6/10

Looper

This is time travel sci-fi starring Bruce Willis that still manages to be fresh, thoughtful, and clean, and lord that says a lot. Time travel is a tricky device, because it’s either an anything-goes reduction to the absurd, or a just a cheap storytelling dead end that leaves an audience bored and unsatisfied. Especially if you read comic books, the first hint of time travel is usually the first hint of a deus ex machina.

But Looper is a time travel movie that manages to bring something new to the subgenre, and does so with dopeness. JGL is of course at the top of his game; the makeup makes him look a lot like Bruce Willis, (only he looks kinda like a tranny in like one particular shot). But most of all he sounds like Bruce Willis, and it’s actually kinda mind blowing.

In addition to JGL and Willis, the cast is really great: Emily Blunt is simultaneously tough and emotional, Jeff Bridges is funny and scary, Paul Dano is pathetic, and this kid Piece Gagnon is way too young to be this good at acting.

I’ve heard a lot of people saying that this is “a time travel movie that isn’t about time travel” or something like that. They’re lying. All of the story’s major plot mechanics rely on temporal manipulation. But I understand what they mean: the movie is so good that the time travel doesn’t feel like absurdity or parlor tricks. Most importantly, it’s not confusing; the flow of the movie makes everything feel credible, even if ultimately the script falls victim to several natural paradoxes.

So at the diner afterwards, when you’re cataloguing the metaphysical details with your friends, don’t get carried away. Some of them just aren’t there.

But Rian Johnson’s movie is designed to make the nerdiest of us feel like that’s OK. Because it’s the movie’s thematic content- the idea that you can be at odds with your own destiny, the cosmic power of motherhood, the dark corners of utilitarian morality - that is truly primary.

So yeah. Loved it.

9/10

Argo

Between Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and now Argo, I’ve been thinking of a phrase to describe Ben Affleck’s directorial material. I’ve settled on this: Ben Affleck directed movies are ”unusually good.” This is his third feature in a row that counts as unfalteringly solid, and I think it’s safe to say he’s better at directing than half the career directors in Hollywood today.

Although the whole “CIA funded sci-fi movie production rescues American hostages from scary terrorist Iran” thing is pretty high-concept, there’s a sense of dread, sadness, and humanity that permeates and enlivens what might otherwise have been a by-the-numbers spy/action movie. Affleck’s drama is informed by context, momentum, and juxtaposition, and Argo boasts an incredible cast to bring those elements home. Even if you forget Ben Affleck, who everyone loves to deride for no reason, we’ve got Brian Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin (my fav here), and Kyle Chandler (coach from FNL).

The only drawback to the story is that it suffers from a real feeling of inevitability. Even with great pacing and a concerted effort at constructing tense scene after tense scene, it’s just the kind of movie where you know how it all ends. So it’s not giving anything away to say that there’s a distinct moment at the end when all the tension breaks, and I must say it’s just perfect.

7.5/10

Ryder ponders the relationship between metaphysics and...

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:13:29 -0400

Ryder ponders the relationship between metaphysics and subjective happiness.

SYVEREVIEW: The Dark Knight Rises

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:09:00 -0400

SPOILER FREE.

SERIOUSLY.

This, I think, is Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece.

Rises is a perfectly plotted, epic and satisfying crescendo to the most important and influential superhero trilogy in genre history. I could say this a million different ways, but I won’t embellish: Simply, I love this movie.

Impossibly, Rises was even better than I had imagined throughout all those long years since 2008. Although not quite the runaway “oh SHIT!” train that The Dark Knight was, this film sets a series of complex, engaging pieces moving in the beginning, and the payoff at the end is truly spectacular. Like a magician, Nolan is a master of misdirection, and when his plot threads blossom in the third act, it’s a truly gorgeous example of storytelling. Nearly three hours of film absolutely fly by when structure is this good. The film never drags, not once.

Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon Levitt absolutely rock their respective characters, and their performances make one really lament that we won’t see them in these roles again. I think those two steal the show, but Christian Bale is predictably masterful. His Rises Bruce is convincingly hobbled, physically and emotionally. Bruce’s open vulnerability, painfully stark during an emotional falling out with Alfred early on, gives way to picture a delusional, and at times frankly pathetic, aging malcontent. More than ever, the audience itself worries for him and wonders when he’ll stop hurting himself.

Tom Hardy provides a massive, sublime presence, with a demeanor and character backstory that create shocking coldness and distance. The more we see of and find out about Bane, the more we come to realize that we will never understand a thing about him. His life experience is truly, gravely beyond our contemplation, to the point of literal metaphysical estrangement. This detachment haunts and terrifies Bruce. After all, “Batman” itself is an apology for Bruce’s privilege; the primary motivating factor behind his excursion to the far East was his need to “understand.”

But here we are, two movies later, and Bruce is still being reminded that he doesn’t get it -and he never will, without suffering volumes more pain, horror, and despair. Bane’s character is incredibly strong, but I did get the sense that Hardy could have been given a little more to “work with.” The fiasco over the voicing never seems to have been satisfactorily resolved, and his facial expressions are always obscured, couched in the mask. But then again, his performance is one that you can see in his eyes. And he has the scariest line of perhaps the entire trilogy. Placing his hand on a corrupt fatcat’s shoulder, he croaks, “Do you feel in charge?”

Initially, I had planned on beginning this review by flatly asserting that The Dark Knight Rises was better than The Dark Knight. But that would be unfair, and not just because it’d be a statement deliberately designed to shock you into reading further.

It would be unfair to say Rises was better, because the second and third installments of our generation’s definitive statement on Batman just aren’t that comparable. They’re so different from each other- thematically, structurally, and visually- that healthy analysis demands they be viewed as distinct compliments to each other. Not competitors. One thing I don’t look forward to over the next few decades is Clerks-style debates over the merits of each film in contradistinction to one another (full disclosure: I champion Jedi over Empire all the time).

Nolan’s trilogy stands out as “more than” just a superhero franchise for all sorts of reasons. For starters, his “story-first” method of filmmaking combines with his sense of socio-gothic aesthetics to make us feel like we’re watching something we don’t have to be embarrassed about. A mature method to storytelling remains inexplicably absent from the other corners of the comic book movie world; as much as I loved The Avengers and all the other Marvel films, they’ll never be the kind of movies you can unblushingly discuss with your boss or your girlfriend’s parents.

But these movies are more than just great stories. Each of Nolan’s installments successfully capture, with expertly broad and inoffensive strokes, themes political and psychological that uncannily resonate with just about everyone. Politically, it’s easy to see pop representations of millennial recession paranoia in Begins, terrorism in Dark Knight and radical populism in Rises. These make for some fun and somewhat stimulating pop dialogues.

But if I had to boil the Nolan trilogy down into just one theme, it’s all psychological. My view is that Nolan’s trilogy works to explore the way fear and anxiety can drive and dominate ambition, and ultimately engender lifestyles tortured and destructive. It’s about when life stops being about dreamt aspirations, and becomes more about hallucinated obligations.

Bruce Wayne is a man deeply hurt by so much in his life, and swaths of pain pile on top of each other like layers of scar tissue. His default emotions are perennially distraught: over his parents, over Rachel and Harvey, over his own unreconciled sense of self worth. Pain is his only true motivation, and like an addict, his lifestyle is concomitantly designed to seek and devour more and more suffering.

The only man who seems to see this cycle clearly is Alfred, who goes to pieces over the sorrow that such behavior inspires. Alfred chokes back tears in virtually every scene we see him in. Michael Caine’s performance is passionate and honest. His monologues are filled with so much love, that it’s almost too much to bear.

That Bruce Wayne is Batman for all the wrong reasons has been a touchstone of Batman characterization at least since Miller. But Nolan’s genius lies in infusing the other major characters with this idea. We see it in Jim Gordon’s naked loneliness, in Selina Kyle’s relentless self-pity, in Bane and the Joker’s acquiescence to a deranged, hideous processes of self-actualization, and in Harvey Dent’s naive sense of personal betrayal and disappointment with the world around him. It’s just stunning how all of these people are radically different, yet fit together like puzzle pieces in sad, psychotic collision.

The standard line on Nolan’s Batman is that it’s good because it’s “realistic.” But don’t delude yourself into swallowing that. It’s a reductive conclusion, and not even all that accurate. These will always be comic book movies, and it’s unbecoming to try and insist otherwise. But unlike every single other superhero movie out there, the Dark Knight triptych reminds us that we probably wouldn’t like living inside a comic book one bit, because we probably couldn’t handle a world any more insane than it already is.

Nolan’s philosophy of the superhero recognizes first, that art is not a mirror, but an impression of humanity. To this end, Nolan committed his work to the idea that metaphors, representations, and even caricatures can garner far more depth than fiction fixated on purportedly “realist” snobbishness. Fans of the genre can (hopefully) stop apologizing for their own enjoyment and belief in this idea. Nolan is the first superhero filmmaker who has helped make this possible.

The Dark Knight Rises fulfills Nolan’s vision, and gives his trilogy the kind of ending it so desperately deserved. Viewed holistically, the experience is an engrossing meditation on the pangs of contemporary existence and a climactically unambiguous affirmation of mankind’s inherent nobility. Like planet Earth today, Nolan’s world is at once apocalyptic and progressive. And alas, that will always be the rub.

Just breathtaking.

10/10