Marc Seguy’s blog

Joan Crawford, whose whilom western was Montana Moon in 1930, has another try at the wide open spaces with Johnny Guitar. In the mood for Moon, it proves the actress should leave saddles and levis to someone else and consolidate to city lights for a background.

The Roy Chanslor novel on which Philip Yordan based the screenplay provides this Republic release with a conventional oater basis. Scripter Yordan and director Nicholas Ray became so involved with character nuances and neuroses, that ‘Johnny Guitar’ never has enough chance to rear up in the saddle and ride at an acceptable outdoor pace.

Crawford plays Vienna, strong-willed owner of a plush gambling saloon standing alone in the wilderness of Arizona. She knows the railroad’s coming through and she will build a whole new town and get rich. Opposing her is Mercedes McCambridge, bitter, frustrated leader of a nearby community.

Love, hate and violence, with little sympathy for the characters, is stirred up during the overlong film.

Thursday, July 17th, 2008
by

Bob Cashill

Watching a superdeluxe presentation of

The Dark Knight

unfold across the eight-story-tall IMAX theater in Manhattan, I had a nagging question: why was the mayor of Gotham City wearing eyeliner and mascara? The movie has anvil-sized matters on its mind, like duality, and good and evil, and guilt and expiation — enough weighty themes to overstuff a Dostoevsky novel. But I latched onto that one stupid detail, a clear Bat-signal that the Caped Crusader had returned but wasn’t doing that much for me.

The next morning I had my answer: the actor is Nestor Carbonell, who apparently looks much the still and all on

Abandoned

. I’m sure that’s a fine islander look (I wouldn’t know, as I don’t watch the show), but it was curious for a stuffed shirt in an urban jungle. It kept throwing me out of the bigger understanding that cowriter and the man Christopher Nolan had made to follow up

Batman Begins

, the one that fanboys have been salivating finished since 2005. Maybe it was the fault of the sky-high IMAX process, which enhances what works in a film — here, a semi-superfluous trip to Hong Kong prominent by death-defying visuals when Batman takes plane in its glass-and-steel canyons, and a truck flip that lands in your lap — but amplifies what doesn’t, groove on an bizarre makeup job. You might not even notice it at your garden-variety multiplex, which is where I had planned to see

The Dark Knight

an additional one or two more times. At intervals may be enough, though. With apologies to those with tickets in submit for the weekend, and those so engorged on the hype that dissenters must be ingrained out and punished by the once in a while the weekend tally rolls in, I can no longer beat concerning the Bat-bush, and must state that

The Dark Knight

is the most pathetic moving picture of the year.

It was not reputed to be this respect, and I’m as crushed to report this as you may be to read it. Nolan, the creator of the resent-bending

Souvenir

(2000), rescued Batman from the ash heap of the Joel Schumacher era (1995’s

Batman Forever

and 1997’s

Batman & Robin

), which made the Adam West TV series look like Strindberg by comparison, and

Batman Begins

is one of the more confident “origins” stories, a slate wiped decontaminated for renewal. Sincerely, it is virtually inflated, and heavy with portent; the Gothic fun of Tim Burton’s contributions (1989’s

Batman

and 1992’s

Batman Returns

) was missed, and I’ll hold up show that I fancy Burton’s fantastic touch.
(Sit me down in haughtiness of

Batman Returns

and I won’t budge for two hours.) By bringing the Joker invest in onto the scene,

The Dark Knight

promised to extract off some of the gloom and pocket its freak on. But it has a serious case of the glums and progresses at a lurching, dawdling pace — it’s the

Reparation

of superhero sagas.
As

The Dark Knight

opens, Batman’s good example has spawned a rash of copycat do-gooders, who come to misfortune at the hands of Gotham City’s weakening but unshakable mob (led by Eric Roberts, dusted free and in sleek, malign shape).
An upstart kingpin, the mysterious Catch, is bedeviling the forces of good and evil with his own anarchic offence drinking-bout, its purpose unknown. He demands the unmasking of Batman to stall the impracticality, and our hero’s convert ego, Bruce Wayne, considers complying. Wayne is burdened by the responsibility of his heroism, which puts him at arm’s space fully from his previous care, attorney Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in in the interest of Katie Holmes). Dawes has taken up with “chalky knight” Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a headline-hogging DA who is nonetheless absolutely straightforward relative to loosening Gotham from the feeling of criminals, and frowns upon the federation Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) has formed with the vigilante Batman. Offering advice from the sidelines is Wayne family retainer Alfred (the unflappable Michael Caine) and Batman builder Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, back to playing Mr. Nice Guy after his villainous turn in

Wanted

). It goes without saying that the Joker, who has his own yen for Batman, complicates the central romantic triangle: “You complete me,” he drools, under Batman’s protective custody, as he makes a different play for Dent. (The homoeroticism of the Schumacher pictures has been retired, but the treacherous allure of false fronts is an evergreen of this style.)

The late Heath Ledger plays the Funny man, in his second-to-form film (footage he completed for Terry Gilliam’s next movie,

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

, will be used in the final cut). Surely his tutti-frutti supervillain will be his swan song.
Affecting a hunched walk and a lawless cackle, the Comic revels in his malice, and Ledger, caked in congealed clown standing, jump-starts the show as he tries on separate accents — a little Cagney here, a little Brando there — and makes a nudnik of himself. He leaves an indelible impression, granted for all the talk about his performance, the Joker is small-sheeted by the plot. Jack Nicholson may give birth to had too much to do when he took a snap at the take a part in 19 years ago; Ledger, meanwhile, is actually obligated to nursemaid Harvey Dent for his entry as the ruined Two-Face.

What I like about the Joker is that he has no origins, or, rather, origins that are in constant, teasing flux as he brandishes his knives before his latest victim. What I don’t like about

The Dark Knight

is that it succumbs to “villainitis” (see also 2007’s

Spider-Man 3

), necessitating a lengthy makeover on Dent and bringing the running time to a draggy two and a half hours. Eckhart, an effective actor in a narrow range, is strictly One-Face in the part, and has made enough of a specialty playing disreputable rakes that it’s difficult to take Dent at “face value,” as it were. (It doesn’t help that an early bit of courtroom heroism on the DA’s part is so poorly staged by Nolan that I kept thinking it was some sort of setup.) The grotesque makeup when he transforms should mask a pure heart, but Eckhart lacks that essential quality, and Christian Bale, who has the facets of his part down pat, seems to patronize him.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, patronizes us. If their dialogue were printed in comics form, the bubbles would consume the page. The characters don’t talk — they converse in position papers, calling to our attention whatever nuances are left in duality, and good and evil, and so on that haven’t already been plumbed by every other comic-book movie to come down the pike. These themes are exhausted from overuse, and are better shown rather than told, but Nolan is tongue-tied visually. The action set pieces fitfully deliver the “whammo” factor but are hurriedly edited and difficult to parse; a sequence involving sonar detection was incoherent in IMAX, and simple entrances and exits hard to follow.

The problem, I think, is that Nolan is Two-Face. He responds to the iconography of Batman but wants to uplift it with gusts of pretension. The unleavened verbiage is delivered on spic-and-span sets, including a “Batcave” that is a fluorescent-lit office space. With its elevated-train railway and Wayne Manor,

Batman Begins

had some funk to it. All trace of that, however, has been wiped clean by Nolan, production designer Nathan Crowley, and cinematographer Wally Pfister, who are gunning for naturalism, and succeed too earnestly. Gotham City is the spitting image of Chicago, where the film was shot, and too clean to support the masked marauders who are said to own its streets. Where do they come from — IKEA? Eradicating the fantasy component that has buttressed the concept from the start makes the parade of misfits and human monsters more than a little ridiculous. Maybe Nolan is too British for the simple pleasures of American comic books? Maybe the simple pleasures of American comic books are buried beneath the strained seriousness of “graphic novels”? Whatever — the turn toward “reality” was a mistake. Give us the tools to dream.

There are other errors. Outside of the marquee names, most of the supporting parts are indifferently acted; ah, for the days when Warner Bros., the film’s distributor, had a roster of great one-scene actors at its disposal. Meanwhile, the score, by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, was problematic the first time around, and a seriously monotonous drone here — how have two Oscar-lauded talents gotten away with teaming up to create so little? (Danny Elfman and Elliot Goldenthal did terrific work on prior Batman films all by themselves.) I could, I’m afraid, go on, but I feel a posse breathing down my neck already that started forming with the eyeliner comment. Like the Dark Knight, I must steal away into the evening, the dirty job that someone had to do now done.