Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Spring has apparently sprung at this point, though you wouldn’t know it by the grim, cloud-haunted spectacle outside my window. Still, even if we can’t measure the season in beautiful spring days, we at least have the inexorable march of anime production to help us keep the time. Apparently Tsutomu Mizushima’s got another original show this season, which may well raise me from my slumber to the point of actually watching an airing production. And beyond that, I’m also beginning my fashionably late consumption of recent favorites, with Frieren and Delicious in Dungeon currently at the top of my list.
After watching through Zeta, ZZ, Char’s Counterattack, 08th MS Team, G Gundam, War in the Pocket, Stardust Memory, and Unicorn, I’m feeling a little Gundamed out at the moment, so I’m looking forward to balancing things with some fantasy – and of course, if you all have suggestions regarding classics I’ve missed, I’m always looking for new favorites. Anyway, that about covers my anime state of the union, so let’s press onward to the film screenings!
First up this week was The Fall, an ‘06 fantasy adventure and clear labor of love for its writer-director Tarsem. After embracing a variety of gorgeous dreamscapes and ambitious location photography for his prior film The Cell, Tarsem seemingly committed himself to realizing a film that exists almost entirely in the world of our imagination. The result is as visually breathtaking and narratively wobbly as you might imagine, a film that asks us what story we will make of our own lives, and who we might trust to tell it.
As you can guess, as a fan of both psychology-as-narrative and stories about stories, I had a fantastic time with Tarsem’s opus. Lee Pace stars as a would-be stunt actor in the early days of cinema, hoping to recover from an on-set injury and facing the fear of never walking again. With the woman he loved also betrothed to another, Pace distracts himself by telling a fantastical interpretation of his grievances to a young girl named Alexandria. That interpretation is rich in color and costume, spanning worldwide locations of majestic beauty and harrowing desolation.
In the push and pull of Pace’s telling and his audience’s reception, we see the distinct yet equally vital things that the same story can mean to different people. Some of this is expressed quite literally: for example, Pace’s conception of an “Indian” is very different from Alexandria’s, but we only hear his version and only see his audience’s. More fundamental disagreements arise over the ultimate meaning of the text: while Pace sees his story as merely a method to exploit a child’s curiosity, and a eulogy for the life he could have led, Alexandria sees something hopeful and inspiring in his tale of lost love and bitter revenge.
Through the interplay of his dueling storytellers, Tarsem presents a poignant articulation of the transformative power of storytelling, an expression of faith in our ability to write ourselves a brighter future. And through the care he takes in staging and locations, The Fall offers a visual experience unlike anything else in cinema. An unapologetically starry-eyed ode to our lives as stories we tell about ourselves, realized through unerringly gorgeous fantasy vignettes – yes, I very much liked this one.
Our next viewing was An American Werewolf in Paris, the ill-fated 1997 sequel to John Landis’ classic ‘80s original. There’s really nothing to get into regarding the film’s casting or script or drama; it’s essentially a retread of the original in every way that matters, except now furnished with an awkward love story and some rippin’ ‘90s tunes (Bush! Fastball! Better Than Ezra!). The original American Werewolf was acclaimed for basically one reason: its luscious, horrifying practical effects, which conveyed the process of becoming a werewolf as one of the most viscerally uncomfortable experiences imaginable. In the sequel, paint and prosthetics are subbed in for low-rent mid-90s CG, making for a film where three variations on Pauly Shore are assaulted by beasts from Return to Castle Wolfenstein. You can probably skip this one.
We then checked out Fear, a gleefully trashy thriller starring Reese Witherspoon as a repressed teen who cannot help but fall for the neighborhood bad boy, Mark Wahlberg. However, as it turns out, her father was right to worry about that Wahlberg kid. Adoration swiftly turns to obsession as Witherspoon attempts to break off the engagement, preceding stalking, violence, and a climactic siege of Witherspoon’s family home.
Fear makes no apologies about being a scandalous spine-tingler, taking full advantage of both Witherspoon’s natural innocence and Wahlberg’s ominous intensity. I’m frankly not sure how Wahlberg ever acquired “teen heartthrob” status in the first place, as to me he always looks like someone who’s clearly stuffed more than a few bodies in a meat locker – but here, that contradiction in look and affect are actually put to work marvelously, his clear menace positioning us alongside Witherspoon’s father right from the start. If you want to see Wahlberg go bananas, this humble production is happy to serve.
Last up for the week was The Batman, Matt Reeves’ recent take on the caped crusader, starring Robert Pattinson as a young Batman in the first years of his night activities. Working along a smartly cast but unfortunately scripted Jeffrey Wright as Gordon, Pattinson is forced to do some actual friggin’ detective work, hunting a killer whose actions point to a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of Gotham society. Along the way, he’ll interact with a generously cast collection of Gotham heavies, including John Turturro as crime lord Carmine Falcone and Colin Farrell as a delightfully curmudgeonly Penguin.
One of the most interesting things about The Batman is how it seems to embody a fresh aspect of comic culture transferring over to cinema: the prestige comic miniseries, stories like Year One or The Dark Knight Returns or The Killing Joke. These stories assume a familiarity with the larger Batman mythos that simply wouldn’t have flown in previous decades; comic adaptations were expected to explain their premises, and that basically necessitated most first films regarding a given character to be origin stories. Not so for The Batman, though truthfully, the nature of Bruce Wayne’s origins seems to hang more oppressively over this Batman than any prior cinematic realization.
Because this is not a heroic fantasy of maintaining justice by pure force of will. This is a detective drama, a production far more indebted to film noir than Flash Gordon, and Pattinson’s Batman is a suitably moody, self-destructive take on the character. Pattinson didn’t rise out of his parents’ murder into a glorious rebirth; he’s still clearly haunted by it, a misanthrope so uncomfortable with social interaction that he basically had to put on the mask, and also an overgrown rich kid who can barely relate to the people he intends to protect. Watching him stumble through his investigations offers a satisfaction unlike any other Batman film; he actually feels like an underdog here, overwhelmed by the scale of his mission, and seemingly more interested in punishing himself than saving others.
All of this makes for a uniquely engaging Batman film, further furnished with excellent supporting performances and unexpected flashes of humor to cut through the gloom. My biggest complaint with the feature, aside from a touch of repetition, is that the case he’s on is just too simplistic to echo the noir greats Reeves is clearly recalling. Most of this film’s big reveals can be reduced to “the city’s police and government are complicit in its criminal enterprises,” which like, yeah, welcome to literally any city. Pattinson’s naivete sorta works for his character, but I expected a story that is so grounded and gloomy in all other respects to have sharper teeth when it came to its thematic takeaway. Nonetheless, this stands as a comic book film that’s accomplished and different enough from the usual fare to definitely earn a watch.
