EW review: 'Batman Begins' a triumph
By Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
(Entertainment Weekly) -- One benefit of not being a comic-book fanboy or -girl is the immunity such dispassion grants: No blood-pressure crises are likely to arise over arguments pertaining to whether "Batman Begins" lives up to the franchise launched 16 years ago by director Tim Burton and Batman No. 1, Michael Keaton, then sullied -- tsk! -- eight years ago by director Joel Schumacher and Batman No. 3, George Clooney, with that unholy nippled Batsuit.
My intelligent-nonspecialist-person's requirements for any summertime live-action movie based on a comic book are simply, neutrally these: (1) Make it fun (that's where "The Hulk" fell down); (2) make it fresh (that's where "X2" was such an advance over "X-Men"); (3) make it meaty (that's where "Spider-Man 2" was a feast).
And by these standards, "Batman Begins," directed by indie-oriented storyteller Christopher Nolan ("Memento"), is a triumph -- a confidently original, engrossing interpretation, with a seriously thought-through (but never self-serious) aesthetic point of view that announces, from the get-go, someone who knows what he's doing is running the show, and he's modestly unafraid to do something new.
The movie reenergizes Bruce Wayne and his winged mammalian disguise for a 21st-century relaunch, after the Hollywoodized Caped Crusader had giggled and vamped to a dead end with 1997's "Batman & Robin." And it advances and deepens the mythology by showing, quite meticulously (but with flits of fanged humor), how childhood trauma led the rich young orphan to burrow down deep into his anger and guilt so that when he emerged, he was able to become the Dark Knight, grim savior of a city going to hell.
That's always the tricky part, isn't it: giving a comic-book hero psychological weight, but not so much that the gee-whiz saving-the-world stuff is overtaken by psychoanalysis. Or giving the superhero-in-training so much instruction at the hands of an aphorism-spouting teacher that the Yoda-babble gets in the way of the learning curve. Yet "Batman Begins" avoids the deepest of these potholes with notable nimbleness. (The script is by Nolan and comic-book guru David S. Goyer, best known for the "Blade" trilogy.)
When first encountered in a Chinese prison camp -- those early images a blunt, swift-moving statement that Nolan is interested in the look of the real over that of the gaudy or grand -- our not-yet-Batman is already on an independent-study trip to learn the ways of criminals. Then he's plucked for training by Henri Ducard (Liam Neeson, possibly wearing old Jedi Master underpants), a recruiter for the humorless vigilante group that calls itself the League of Shadows. (''All creatures feel fear.'' ''Men fear most what they cannot see.'' ''Embrace your worst fear,'' Ducard says, until our biggest fear is that he'll say, ''We have nothing to fear but fear itself.'')
And only then does Batman find his wings, and his mission. That Bruce's parents were killed before his eyes, and that the heir to the Wayne fortune would be nowhere without his butler, Alfred, even the greenest newbie to the hagiography knows.
But knowing doesn't pack the same pleasurable jolt as seeing primly smoldering Christian Bale's Batman No. 4 play so comfortably against expansively proper Michael Caine's Alfred (taking over for Michael Gough as if to the manor born) and watching the two devise the very first Batsuit. Any familiarity with Commissioner Gordon and his place as one overmatched good cop is only rewarded by the participation of Gary Oldman as the younger Detective Gordon.
Simpatico Wayne Enterprises inventor Lucius Fox contributes his mechanical expertise (handy when it comes to Batmobiles) and cool to the proceedings in the person of Morgan Freeman. Katie Holmes provides obligatory, chaste romantic interest -- superheroes are notoriously dull boyfriends, if you ask me -- as Bruce's childhood sweetheart-turned-incorruptible DA.
It's not just the birth of Batman we're seeing here, it's also the dawning of Gotham City's age of corporate greed (Rutger Hauer plays a ruthless CEO), unchecked corruption (Tom Wilkinson swings by as a crime boss), and the insidious misuse of the mentally ill by those appointed to their care (Cillian Murphy is one great creep as psycho psychiatrist Dr. Jonathan Crane).
In "Batman Begins," as Nolan tells it, Gotham is poised somewhere between the Jazz Age and the Space Age, a vertiginous time warp where only a risk-taking artist can navigate. Nolan ought to get back there soon and tell us what happens next.
EW Grade: A
'Rize'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
In "Rize," a documentary in which dance moves come close to looking like a declaration of war, the lean young ''krumpers,'' most of them impoverished men and women from inner-city Los Angeles, work their bodies into a wild state of such hectic gyrating motion that they look, literally, as if they're tearing themselves apart. There isn't a limb or a muscle group that isn't in full frenzy; it's dancing as cathartic seizure.
Directed by David LaChapelle, the noted fashion photographer and music-video auteur, "Rize" opens with ghostly black-and-white footage of the 1965 Watts riots, then video of the 1992 L.A. riots that emerged as a violent response to the Rodney King verdict. I thought I glimpsed the message -- that krump, pioneered in the wake of the '92 riots, embodies the spirit of urban unrest.
But then we're shown something that made my jaw drop: krumpers doing a barely stylized replay of the Rodney King video. A few of them take on the roles of cops, bearing down with invisible billy clubs, and the dancer in the middle is King -- the hero rising, as if by a shaman's magic, from his pummeled stupor.
The impossibly fast, vibratory movements in "Rize" may be familiar from videos (LaChapelle himself first encountered krump on the set of Christina Aguilera's ''Dirrty''), but in this case it's not just the booties that are jiggling. The entire body gets thrust in every direction at once. And here's the thing: The dancers are all, in movement and spirit, the resurrection of Rodney King. As the blows came down, King was forced to lie there, passive, a man stripped of all action and will.
Krump dancing, as captured in "Rize," is a fantasy of retaliatory power, rooted in the violent heart of Compton and Inglewood -- a stylized revolt against impotence, against meeting the world lying down.
As long as it showcases the art of krump, underscoring the dancers with ominous hip-hop beats, "Rize" is such a vibrant eruption of motion and attitude that you can forgive the film for being disorganized and too skimpy on street-dance history. We meet Tommy the Clown, the professional party entertainer who's credited with inventing krump, but we aren't given a vivid enough sense of what he created in '92 or how it developed in the hands of other performers over the next decade.
That said, the Battle Zone V arena contest that provides the film with its climax could be the krumping version of "Fight Club." It has the delirious force of a revival meeting that can't decide whether it's straining toward heaven or hell.
As this era's rough equivalent of the hip-hop docs "Wild Style" and "Style Wars," "Rize" makes you realize just how innocent and optimistic the break dancing of 20 years ago, with its rounded and symmetrical moves, now looks. Once again, though, I sense crossover potential: If the lives of '70s teen skateboarders or white trailer-trash rappers are worthy of dramatic treatment, why not a full-scale Hollywood fable about a dazzling young krumper who dances out his angst on the mean streets?
EW Grade: B+
'The Perfect Man'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
 |  Heather Locklear and Hilary Duff play mother and daughter in "The Perfect Man." |
What sin did Heather Locklear commit to deserve her role in "The Perfect Man"? The former Melrose Place vixen is now old enough to portray Hilary Duff's mom, which in Hollywood counts as sin enough. In "The Perfect Man," she's a single mother so desperate for male company that she thinks she deserves no better than the loser who drives a Trans-Am and woos her with his late-night-on-the-sidewalk performance of Styx's ''Lady.''
To remedy her mom's dating woes, Duff, who grows perkier the worse her movies get, invents a fictional secret admirer who ''pursues'' Locklear with flowers and cloying e-mail notes. This is the story, in other words, of a woman being wooed by a nonentity; it's "You've Got Mail" with one hand typing. Duff's character has problems too (she's tired of moving from city to city), but no actress this synthetically wholesome should engage in this much whining. It renders her about as appealing as a lost Olsen triplet.
EW Grade: F
'Me and You and Everyone We Know'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
The wording of the Special Jury Prize awarded at this year's Sundance Film Festival to Miranda July for her breathtaking feature debut, "Me and You and Everyone We Know," is kind of klutzy -- ''for originality of vision'' suggests a fashion-forward taste in eyewear rather than a superior quality of filmmaking.
But it'll have to do, since definition eludes the delicate pleasures of this marvelous, idiosyncratic movie collage -- the best drama I saw at Sundance -- from a doe-eyed artist whose projects to date have jumped from radio plays to short stories to performance pieces to interactive video art. (Even her name sounds like a piece of fiction or a one-act play.)
In "Me and You," July's theme is the human longing for connection, distilled into a handful of touching, weird, everyday trial-and-error encounters among a collection of interrelated characters who could exist only in -- well, in a Miranda July story.
The filmmaker herself plays a video artist (she drives elderly people in a taxi service to pay the rent) who is attracted to a shoe salesman (Deadwood's John Hawkes) raising two boys after having separated from his wife. And I can't even begin to describe the bizarro yet tenderly ordinary happenstances that befall the boys, the most extraordinary of which involves that powerful identity-disguising phenomenon, the online chat room. And the word poop.
July's handmade movie is so unique and so true to the artist's elementally feminine self, both in form and in content (it also picked up a batch of awards at Cannes), that it's impossible not to respond strongly to it. Or, heck, against it, if that's what her originality of vision evokes. Either way, hers is an artwork not to be missed.
EW Grade: A
'March of the Penguins'
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
How do you prefer your documentary footage of wildlife courtship, mating, and child-rearing habits? Unsweetened or sweetened? "March of the Penguins" makes a compelling case for celebrating the glory of all living things, with special emphasis upon the subdivision known as emperor penguins who prevail, against all climatic challenges, in the ice deserts of Antarctica -- as well as upon the intrepid human filmmakers who tail them.
Luc Jacquet's exquisitely shot eye-of-God study of a year in the lives of these distinctive birds is a nature film built with a feel for the epic and a love of operatic narrative. Like the best (and canniest) examples of the genre, March inspires awe for the animals under consideration, as well as for the moviemaking itself, with no small percentage invested in eliciting a "How'd they get that?" admiration on the part of uplifted viewers. How did Jacquet and his team capture the amazing moment when a female passes her fertilized egg to her male mate for months of incubation while she makes her way back to the sea, 70 miles away, to refuel with food? What a world!
But there is also a case to be made -- and this is where I cast my vote -- for busting Jacquet's avian epic on multiple counts of anthropomorphic hooey. Acquired, understandably, on a wager that it could become the next "Winged Migration," the docu has at least been relieved of its original Teletubby-style French music and Hello Kitty script (much of it involving penguins ''talking'' about their hopes and dreams) with which the film was shown at Sundance this past January.
In its place is a less-French score by Alex Wurman and a calmer narration written by Jordan Roberts and spoken, with elegant trustworthiness, by Morgan Freeman. But the movie still pins its appeal on the nobility of penguin ''love.'' The courting couples no longer whisper foreplay poetry to each other -- I remember wondering whether they'd indulge in a postcoital smoke when I saw the original -- and the baby chicks no longer sing a ditty along the lines of ''How lucky to be a baby chick!''
Yet the refurbished "March of the Penguins" continues to indulge in the whole ''Penguins are heroes, too'' worldview, in which we are encouraged to look at the birds not as Aptenodytes forsteri but as cute little guys who waddle around in penguin suits, doing amazing things out of the goodness of their hearts. As if the creatures weren't camera-worthy enough just being creatures who do things their way with a constancy profound enough to inspire theologians.
Here's the thing: Extreme as their living conditions are and as arduous as their reproductive routines may be, emperor penguins are not ''brave'' or ''resolute'' or moved by romance and commitment. They are birds, miraculously designed, as all living things bright and beautiful are, to reproduce. And that alone makes one hell of a story.
EW Grade: B+
'My Summer of Love'
Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman
Pop culture is now so drenched in glib ''dark'' thrills that it's rare, and purifying, to encounter a movie with a true feel for the sinister. In "My Summer of Love," a startling coming-of-age drama set in a luminous green valley of the Yorkshire moors, Mona (Natalie Press), freckled and strawberry blond, with a slightly coarse adolescent sexiness that lights up whenever she thinks she's formed a connection to someone, is drawn into the orbit of Tamsin (Emily Blunt), who is posh and gorgeous, and damaged in ways we can't quite make out.
On paper, they're opposites. Mona, hiding beneath her hair (think Sissy Spacek's Carrie meets Peppermint Patty), drifts through the days, randy and vaguely depressed -- often the same thing for a teenager. She's having sex with a local bloke who's too old for her, and she lives in a garret just over the pub run by her brother, Phil (Paddy Considine), a violent ex-con who has tried to escape his past by becoming an evangelical Christian.
Tamsin, meanwhile, is spending the summer in her family's ivy-covered mansion. She's a creature of designer dresses and perfectly bred cheekbones, and even her tale of despair -- her sister died of anorexia -- carries a twinge of upper-crust chic.
As the two become friends, then lovers (the fact that both are female is treated as a casual nonissue), the writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski follows their relationship with a sophisticated grasp of the delights, secrets, and shared woes that can bring teenage girls together. Tamsin's cruelty is the wild card here (in a jolting scene, she uses her sexual power to burn through Phil's Jesus-freak pieties), and the affair grows ominous and gothic under the lazy British sun.
An austerely heightened tale of sensual anxiety, "My Summer of Love" is shot in a gorgeous, saturated handheld style that recalls the Danish Dogmatists but also carries premonitions of perversity and dread that reach back to such Roman Polanski films as "Knife in the Water" and "Cul-de-Sac."
Pawlikowski has made a romance that becomes a horror movie in which love, more than anything around it, is a delusionary fever to fear. Blunt and Press, each making her debut, create an ambiguous bond charged with rapturous suspicion. A prediction: "My Summer of Love" will be the first of many acts for these two.
EW Grade: A
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