One blog. Two opinions. One zillion films.

Tam,

As the crisp preautumnal breezes of Snow King’s summit ridge soothed our gizzards — this was yesterday — Greg piped up, “I finally saw The Dark Knight.”

Greg was pretty jazzed with Heath Ledger. We larfed loudly as we swapped favorite scenes; I’m partial to Ledger’s Nurse Ratched bit, especially his moment of frustration with a bomb’s fussy remote control. (Just as someone had vastly improved Star Wars: Episode I by removing every Jar Jar Binks scene, I think there may be a market for a Joker-only cut of The Dark Knight.)

After our chuckles Greg shook his head in sorrow and concluded that outside of the Ledger-demain (sorry), “It was the biggest waste of $150 million dollars ever.”

Perhaps I’ll watch it again someday and be more impressed. Your post makes me feel I missed a lot. High expectations probably got to me. Christopher Nolan is an extraordinarily intelligent writer and director. His first Batman was excellent, as caped bad-guy-beater-upper movies go. Ever see Memento? A great film noir, a compelling metaphysical statement, the most ingenious jump-around-in-time movie there is, and a “trick ending” movie that tickles.

DK left me perplexed, not so much intrigued as, “Gee, that was a mess.” A lot of heavy concepts were tossed in the air but I could not keep track of them, nor could I tell where they landed.

But Heath. BTTW, needless to say. A 40-feet-wide screen was inadequate to frame him. After Brokeback Mtn I realized that he occupied that rarified Brando DeNiro Day-Lewis Streep cosmos. His death really hurt. Perhaps Heath Ledger’s ultimate gift to humanity is, from now on the tired “kooky surreal supervillain” genre will be replaced with sheer Dadaism. Show of hands, please? Who wants a comeback for Dada?

Because DK is so damned serious, its cartoonish aspects seemed off, especially Aaron Eckhart’s face-off effect, gross and kind of impossible. Who else felt an urge to quack like one of these guys?

dav

David,

Some say The Dark Knight, as directed by Christopher Nolan, is a laborious, over-orchestrated, mind-numbing celluloid tangle. Too much, on top of its darkness.

It is dark.  It is over-orchestrated much of the time, and it comes in about 20 minutes too long.  But there’s a world of brilliant hurt going on; freaky and beautiful.   I begin with Dark Knight’s core: Heath Ledger’s Joker.

Ledger plays Joker in an off-the-charts-never-before-seen-nor-to-be-seen-again manner.  Where did that come from? I visibly jumped in my seat every time Joker jumped on screen. He’s terrifying. Too much for kids, by the way.  Every movement, every word; and the nuance of his voice — those facial ticks, lip licking and reptilian-crossed-with-speed-freak jerking, liquid body work!  He jumped into the abyss. I try to imagine Ledger viewing playbacks of his own performance.  What did he think as he watched those rushes?

Who or what was he channeling?  Maybe Mick Jagger.  Maybe Gene Simmons. And Jack, in The Shining. And Bozo. And Nietzsche.

His makeup: Only the face. The rest of this young Joker’s body is healthy and tanned.  I’d need to check, but I believe Jack Nicholson’s Joker is painted pasty white all over.   We don’t see the flesh of hands, arms or neck.  So Heath’s partially painted body suggests evil in its youth, evil not fully matured.  Like the beginnings of a bad case of poison sumac.  Ledger’s Joker is still hormonal, adolescent. He’s a deranged kitten playing everyone like they were mice for the taking.

It’s a performance for the ages. The AGES.  Put together Heath’s Brokeback performance with Joker — the former played in such an understated, repressed manner — and Dark Knight’s blowtorch performance, and you’ve got movie screen alchemy seemingly impossible to possess.

Posthumous Best Actor.  If that doesn’t occur, it’s the apocalypse.  And speaking of apocalypse, Dark Knight’s war references are plentiful and brilliant.  That’s next.

T.

re: my quantifying Robert Downey, Jr.’s work here, it is metaphysically impossible for thou to surpass my high opinion of his Lazarus stunt. For he Nailed It.

There’s acting, great acting, then transcendence. There are a few actors who routinely find that sweet spot of transcendence, who become another personality entirely to where, when we think of the celebrity and not the character, we sometimes worry. William Hurt. Kevin Kline. And, ouch, Heath Ledger.

I mentioned my BTTW theory of movies. There are BTTW performances in all realms. In climbing. In politics (like, say you just turned 40 and looked around, saw a formerly great country sowing the seeds of its own slow and painful demise, and looked around some more only to discover that everyone intent on running this country had become corrupt, for corruption had become routine, “the way you really get things done.” So you run for president).

Lazarus is an absurd concept. Downey went BTTW by playing him as supremely calm, supremely confident. How many other actors would have gone for mad antics? I stand by my previous adjective: sublime.

Tonight we’re watching Atonement. Seen it?

däv

David-

Well, I think we’ve provided quite enough Thunder thunder!

Here’s another “FIGHT” rule:  YOU AND I ARE ONLY ALLOWED A SINGLE VIEWING OF ANY MOVIE FOR POSTING PURPOSES! This goes for our next up, The Dark Knight.  You’re worried about my razor sharp take on Knight, aren’t you?   Hee hee!   All posts by us, the hosts, must be ‘first take’ posts.  I can’t afford to go to movies twice!   Deal?  If visitors want to wipe our behinds with reviews based on multiple viewings, they may.  When Frank Londy starts sending you and me our own copies, then we can rewind.

I have every faith in your site designing ability, my friend.   But if you need a hand, let’s advertise.

We both enjoyed Thunder, we agree its overall success trumps “retard” angst, though we disagree about kosher “retard” specifics in the film; we’re split on Stiller’s ultimate successes in terms of his film history and how much his character pushes action forward and holds the story up. I agree, the writing is giddily great! Like being hit in the face by a Soupy Sales pie!   And we both bow to Downey’s acting smarts. Me more than you, perhaps.  Stiller’s character gets a bit muddled mid-film. At what point does Tugg leave his character to acknowledge he’s really in danger of becoming jungle stew?  Such smudge spots weaken Stiller’s “Tugg”, and suggest Stiller couldn’t decide where that transition occurs, either.

Neither of us has mentioned Jack Black.  I like Black, but his is the only character that felt like it was an add-on, almost a detracting distraction. He’s one-dimensional.  Aside from that hilarious opening previews riff, he’s irritating.   Just not as funny as everyone else.

Stiller’s great triumph is making Thunder.  It’s almost its own genre.

Brazil. I may have been not inhaling something when I saw that.  And I only saw it once.

TC

Tam,

I’m looking forward to finishing this blog’s design, or hiring someone to do it, or something, because we need to prominently display the following boilerplate:

SPOILER POLICY: ANYTHING CAN BE SPOILED AT ANY MOMENT SO DON’T COME WHINING.

Before I explain — SPOIL — what you’re squirming to reveal, here’s my confession. Learning a movie’s “surprise ending” before watching it (and today they nearly all perform some tricky-doo dazzlewhang ending) never sullies a movie for me. A good movie draws me into the willing defeat of normalcy and I go with it; a lousy movie makes me sit back and analyze its failings on the fly, all superior and smug-like. (I hate critics, especially me.) Either way, preknowledge of the big payoff never dampens my enjoyment.

So. Tom Cruise as Grossman. The eye-gleam Cruise gets when he tackles these impossibly florid parts is genuine mad genius. The yelpers who aren’t yelping re: REE-tard are yelping that Grossman is . . . oh I don’t want to talk about it. It’s just an outlandish, surreal portrait of a thick, hirsute blowhard who has decided he is God while possessing Satan’s temperament. When he busts a move it’s funny as hell.

And you posit that Grossman, you know, set up the whole thing? I took K to see it. I scanned for that plot point. I say he didn’t though by now Grossman is realizing he can take credit for it.

On second viewing I found Tropic Thunder an even better movie. It’s frequently loud and profane, yes, but its quieter parts are just plain great, dialog-rich scenes written “the way they used to write ‘em” except that Stiller and crew put out a ton of fresh material here. True, it’s Downey who keeps this movie’s straight-faced silliness at the level of the sublime but I love movies that are goofs going in, when everyone involved seems to relish the joke.

Two more things about TT: it’s the most brutal satire of Hollywood since The Player.

One more thing about TT: It is what I call a BTTW movie. Balls to the wall. Like great rock and roll performances, certain movies come to life through an focused, explosive burst of energy.

Some BTTW movies are extraordinary disciplines, like Christpoher Nolan’s Memento, about the how being extraordinarily disciplined lets you justify any act. Others are grandiose, visionary and borderline lunacies that peg humanity’s borderline lunacy, like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Which is, by the way, the greatest movie ever made.

dav

David –

You are right on about Cruise.  Never thought I’d hear myself agree to gushing review sentiment for him, but in this role he’s a scene-stealer.  He’s a comic horror of Hollywood control.  I usually wince at the prospect of watching Cruise, but if he gets away from roles primarily calling for zoom shots on wind blown hair, and does more of this absurd parody work, he’d reclaim a whole lot o’ street cred.   I wonder how much of his performance Cruise intuited and how much is due to strong, canny direction.  He’s great when he’s rotten.

It’s tempting to discuss what I suspect is his character’s ultimate function. Cruise’s Les Grossman is, according to Stiller, a composite of several Hollywood egocentric studio moguls.  How far a person like Grossman will go to get what he wants is, I believe, Thunder’s punch line and ultimate dig; an uber-fake-out perpetrated by Grossman on his cast and crew, and on us.  Grossman is playing a high-stakes game, and his groovin’ touchdown dance says his tactics took the trophy.

Some applause for Nick Nolte!   He plays Four Leaf Tayback, whose war bestseller book is adapted in Thunder.  He’s enigmatic and has a few fake-outs of his own up his sleeve.   Tayback may not be a stretch for Nolte, but he deserves piles of kudos here.  He’s endearingly warped, stunned and funny.

Even for Hollywood’s uninitiated there’s a ton of hilarity to be taken from this wet towel snap at tinsel town. Though it’s a box office success proving that all bad publicity is good publicity, it won’t win “Best Picture” or “Best Actor” statuettes.  Stiller has a shot at “Best Director.”  “Supporting Actor” for Downey, maybe. Thunder has “hand.”  Any movie so thoroughly lampooning the golden goose that laid it will have great fun going as far as it can, but takes its chances come Oscar time.

TC

Agreed, Tammy, the fake trailers that open Tropic Thunder are comic masterpieces, satire so potent that they might singlehandedly kill a couple of movie genres that have long needed to be euthanized.

It’s hard to write about Thunder’s “fakery” as you put it, what hepcats of today call “meta.” Knowing, winking self-reference. It’s difficult to explain without spoiling things yet easy to enjoy when it’s handled this well. There are a lot of levels. After the fake trailers, which prime the laugh pump as well as offering character backstory, there’s Lazarus (Downey) as the ultimate suffer-for-art method actor, basically trying the channel Shaft. There’s . . . no, now I’d give away a series of punch lines.

Like you, I’m not always taken by Stiller, especially in mainstream comedy roles, but as Zoolander showed he’s a got a wonderful sense of the absurd. In Thunder, he’s running away from a giant fireball the way hundreds of movie heroes have. Yet Stiller plasters a canny comic expression on his face that is heroic in its lack of vanity.

There’s a lot of in-your-face language (Stiller also co-wrote), and one unnerving comic-gore scene, but what sticks are a lot of subtler touches, like the ridiculous poses macho actors strike when they’re shooting, poses that happen to be lousy stances for accurate shooting.

And the “bad writing.” Good writing is hard enough. Good “bad” writing takes real precision. The bad-war-movie writing here ( “I don’t know what kind of gun it is. I just know the sound it makes as it takes a man’s life.”) and actor-schmactor writing ( “I don’t read scripts. Scripts read me.”) is on the money and perfectly delivered. There’s a lot of that.

And let’s hear it for Tom Cruise. After all these years, he has increased his number of great performances to three.

d

David-

Oh, I see. You’re going to get all NYU-film-school-grad-student on me. Have you met the Olsen twins?

Dargis didn’t have any fun. Sourpuss. She probably grew up without brothers. Tropic Thunder was a ripper, so to speak. Especially the opening previews sequence, Lord have mercy! I’d pay the whole admission fee again just to watch that!

Downey is brilliant and relentlessly funny in Thunder but he won’t get Best Actor. For the same reason Heath didn’t win for Brokeback. The role is too controversial — Hollywood didn’t have the cajones to give Ledger his statue; they made a safer choice. Downey can’t win for playing a black-faced actor, even if he’s making fun of real actors taking such roles so seriously.

The second reason is Heath will get the golden statue posthumously for his Joker role in The Dark Knight. Which we should talk about.

The REEtard/ReTARD issue is two-sided—or four-sided. There’s pronunciation and there’s the two ways in which (brain cell debited) people were referred to in the film.

The less offensive, supremely hilarious referral is when Downey’s character lectures Stiller’s on the correct way to act “retard.” Downey’s Lazarus is a method-trained thespian in blackface for his role, to Stiller’s one-dimensional action star Tugg. Tugg has one major flop in “Simple Jack,” in which he played a freckled, buck-toothed (stupid-slow) farm boy who talks to animals. When Downey lectures Stiller on the nuances of playing “full retard” vs. “partial retard” it is can’t-stop-laughing funny.

What wasn’t so funny was Stiller, playing Tugg, playing Simple Jack. Even to act out someone mimicking an I.Q.-deficient human being had meanness to it. And there were no real dodo birds portrayed in Thunder to speak up for them. Downey’s narcissistic Lazarus had a real black man to smack him upside the head.

I’ve not enjoyed Stiller so much in his past movies, but I did here. Tugg is another Buzz Lightyear. Without Downey, though, he’d be in some trouble. Maybe it’s prescient that Downey plays an Australian actor after the loss of Aussie Heath. Help us, Robert Jr.! You’re our only hope!

Let’s talk about the fakery theme in Thunder. It’s everywhere. You first.

TC

Tammy, 

After seeing a movie I like (or really hate), I check out what the better reviewers have to say. Manohla Dargis in the NYTimes wrote one of her snippier reviews — she didn’t have as much fun watching Tropic Thunder as we did — and maxed her killjoy quotient by lingering over the so-called “retard” controversy.

This inflammatory usage is not reTARD but REE-tard, a cruel locution that is supposed have achieved the same taboo status as the n-word. Agreed, words intended to hurt indefensible people are to be condemned. But the scene in question is brilliantly written, downright hilarious, and insults only the Hollywood habit of milking the fill-in-the-blank-challenged for weeps and Oscars.

So people who refuse to see Tropic Thunder because it uses the word “retard” are REE-tards. There are plenty of other reasons to refuse to see it. Language, a bit of gore, some people seem to be allergic to Ben Stiller.

Stiller’s Zoolander is a litmus test; people either love it or hate it. Tropic Thunder ought to earn the same reaction. It has a few flat spots, but it’s been a while since a comedy had so much hilariously ingenious writing.

Robert Downey, Jr. for best actor? He kills in every frame.

And the more I think about it, the more I like the way the quiet nerdy kid was handled. Arc-wise.

d