SUMMARY MOVIES

I've seen a few of those-- what do they call them?-- tentpole movies in the past month and change. I'd wanted to write something about each of them (well, and about some other movies with somewhat less apparent structural significance), but being realistic means just firing off a few paragraphs apiece before the films fade into the fog of irrelevance they were probably intended to achieve from right after their opening weekend until their DVD release.

I. CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not a great or even a very good movie by most measures, but it is a beloved and evocative one for many filmgoing hearts, mine included. Burton's film has moments of visual brilliance and tweaks here and there which make his film work like a cover of a well-known song, but as a stand-alone film it isn't particularly accomplished. Dahl's story-- in all its three iterations-- paints its human characters in such flat colors that the heightened sentimentality of Mel Stuart's film almost seems justified as a means to finding a human core amidst all the cardboard cut-outs. Burton either mistrusts those moments and rejects staging them or simply can't pull them off. And that's how the improbable finding of a golden ticket or the impossible gift of a chocolate factory ends up being as emotionally resonant as a dance number involving one man digitally replicated a hundred times. Big Fish created some hope that Burton was learning how to create characters capable of being responded-to in a more complex fashion; I think that's on hold again.

Of course, I'm also bitter that I saw a trailer for Burton's Corpse Bride before Charlie and I couldn't help but wish that was the movie that I'd be seeing. Shouldn't he be doing animation exclusively? Really, the film looks fantastic, and I think that's where his vision would translate best. Given the multiplicity of ways in which animated films can be made these days, Burton could probably put together several very good projects.


II. WAR OF THE WORLDS

On Sunday night, July 3, I went to see War of the Worlds. On Monday night I dreamt that I was wading in the ocean not far from a shark. Someone yelled and I looked up and the fin was there, sticking out of the water. I yelled to my kids to stay out of the water, then I got myself out of there. I watched from the shore as the fin stayed, and I thought about what it would be like to be out there, in the shark's path.

That Sunday morning I found my father-in-law and oldest daughter in a quiet corner of their house watching Jaws. More particularly, they were watching the scene where Brody, Hooper and Quint are drinking together in the Orca. She didn't get to see much before our social commitments pulled them away, so it will be a few years before her subconscious is struck through with the image of the inexplicable danger of a shark.

WOTW is probably as close as Spielberg will come to recapturing the spirit of Jaws. It's a shame that Spielberg used up his "it's all a dream" capital on a film as common as Minority Report, because he's tapped into our nightmares in this film. The film's tale of rough, tunnel-visioned survival struck me at the same primal level as a dream, and the attendant destruction and mayhem which sets the story in motion seemed appropriate to the cause. I was glad to see David Edelstein make the same connection to nightmare visions in a recent piece ("I don't know if Tim [Noah] would consider the original Godzilla "pornography," but a respectable body of critics—myself among them—consider it a haunting depiction, by the Japanese themselves, of the trauma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Farther afield, I can't think of a film that captures the social upheaval—racial and interfamilial—of the middle and late '60s as suggestively as Night of the Living Dead (which War of the World evokes in the cellar scene with Tim Robbins)."). I've also been mentioning how much Romero's zombie films touch me in a soft spot in my subconscious, and they show up in my nightmares much more often than any other films.


It's worth asking whether the film is better or worse for being headlined by Tom Cruise even if the film were released in a year when he wasn't so dead-set on achieving cultural omnipresence. He plays this character well, of course. Sure, he's a bit more deadbeat than the typical Cruise Achiever character, but it's the same self-possessed charm. His appeal as a movie star has never lain in connecting the audience to a projection of deep virtue or benevolence, but rather in hitching our modest and prudent selves to his narcissistic self-confidence. Even here, among the worst imaginable dangers and sights, he's comparatively collected and level-headed even if a large part of the film is about showing how his natural-born cockiness is neutered and he's reduced to running and hiding. That's all to say that he probably doesn't hurt the film. It's also worth asking whether it might have been better-received from a critical point of view if it weren't a summer movie. Clearly, in Hollywood terms anything directed by Spielberg and toplined by Cruise and costing this much money has three reasons to debut between Memorial Day and the end of July, but I think there's a significant film here that gets lost in the hustle and bustle of summer event films.


III. BATMAN BEGINS (and that's a threat)

Batman Begins shows us the origin of the hero at length, beginning with his days learning martial arts in the Far East to his construction of the Batcave, through his development of the costume and equipment and into his first foray into crimefighting, in which he thwarts a villainous plan to kill everyone in sight. As far as I can tell, the villainous plot involves delivering fear through the Gotham City water supply, which I suppose is a neat twist on the general status quo in which people are simply afraid of their drinking water. This plot, again as far as I can tell, is derailed largely because the poisoner (Liam Neeson, Nell) is compelled to take public transportation when delivering the threat.

I'm pretty sure of two things: this film is a meticulous and faithful cinematic recreation of the whole Batman: Year One vibe and I could barely keep myself interested in it. I'm not convinced the themes that are inherent in every Batfilm are enough to engage me. We get a heavy thematic dose of fear. Fear is both good and bad, depending on the user, the circumstance and the intended end. I couldn't keep straight whether I was supposed to respect fear or, well, fear it. I checked the possession arrow at the end of the film and it was pointing both ways. Oh, and there's also the requisite meditation on the justice of heroes who don't kill bad guys. Maybe my memory is faulty, but didn't the comic miniseries responsible (or culpable) for the Bat-renaissance openly reject the line of reasoning that runs through this film? Can I please be teleported to the alt uni where Frank Miller decided to reinvent Aquaman? I'm too old for this shit.