Last week I watched Batman Begins. Truth is, I was a little worried about this one. I’m a fan of comic books and while I don’t buy any of DC Comics’ current Batman output, I spent more than a few bucks on them in the late 1990s. Armed with all my geek knowledge and my mental checklist of notes they needed to hit, I sat down to watch the movie and surprisingly, I loved it.

What a great movie. Warner Brothers did the smart thing and went back to basics with this one, tossing out the previous film interpretations and all the baggage that came with them. (We don’t have to worry that ice skates will pop out of Batman’s boots anymore! Yay!)

Director Christopher Nolan and writer David Goyer made a smart decision when they decided to weave Bruce Wayne’s childhood story into the story of his young adulthood. This is one of those stories that everyone knows, at least to a certain extent, yet it still has to be told. The origin could have been a wasted fifteen minutes of film that put its audience to sleep, but in Batman Begins, it’s told compellingly yet sparingly, giving us just enough, and just when we need it.

When Wayne travels the world training himself to perfection, Christian Bale’s delivery is real and honest. The training scenes were wonderfully shot, culminating in Bruce’s split with Ra’s al Ghul, a decision that will come back to haunt him later. (Sorry for the spoilers, but you need to head to the back of the class if you didn’t see that one coming.)

Part of the trouble with Batman, from the writer’s perspective, is that he has to be completely feared by the baddies (and to a certain extent, the general population), but still manage to be a hero. Batman Begins does a good job of walking that line. It keeps the altruistic intentions of Bruce Wayne and still manages to make Batman a vicious monster. Seriously, I’ve never been more afraid of Batman.

There’s absolutely no question that the villains know that this is the boogeyman come to get them, and that’s exactly what Batman should be. This is one of the big difference between Batman and, for example, Superman. Superman is friend of the good guys. Batman takes the opposite position and is the enemy of the enemies. An important difference, I think, and one that I’m impressed they worked in.

Now for the villains. In short, I loved them. Cillian Murphy (above) doesn’t need the mask and special effects to be scary, he does it just fine on his own. Unassuming and almost prissy in delivery, Dr. Crane (Scarecrow’s day face) perfectly plays his psychological games before he even takes out his fear gas. Beautifully nightmarish special effects with the fear gas, too.

Ducard and Ra’s al Ghul (played by Liam Neeson and Ken Watanabe) become a counterpoint to Batman’s benevolence, with al Ghul deciding that Gotham City is past redemption, and that the best solution is to destroy the entire city in one fell swoop. Interesting that al Ghul’s villainy comes as a response to another villain’s actions. This is the kind of layering that was missing when Danny DeVito was chewing up the scenery going “Wah Wah Wah.”

Finally, we need to address the Katie Holmes issue. Just about every review I read when the movie came out two years ago mentioned how she was the weak link and that she walked through the part in a daze. I really didn’t have a problem with her performance. The part of Rachel Dawes was a bit two-dimensional, but I thought Holmes did a fine job with it. It wasn’t life changing, but let’s be realistic, she’s Katie Holmes, not Judy Dench.

There are a lot of things I’m leaving out, but I’ve already gone long. Here’s some quickies: Batmobile=Awesome; Gordon=the dad on Alf; Monorail fight=Suspenseful (har har); Lucius Fox=Potential; Michael Caine=Perfect; Christian Bale=Sore throat; and Swimming in the fountain=Paris Hilton.

This movie did what a lot of summer blockbuster-type movies don’t: It delivered action and asplosions without sacrificing quality writing and character development. Batman Begins is easily the best “comic book movie” I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s a good “movie movie” besides. It isn’t without its faults (I hate that the only way you can tell Bruce is younger is that his hair is combed different.), but it’s certainly better than most of the films showing.

Hopefully interesting coincidence: Christian Bale and Gary Oldman starred in competing made-for-TV films about Jesus Christ in 1999. Bale played Jesus in Mary, Mother of Jesus, and Oldman was Pontius Pilate in Jesus. Since finding an irreligious review of either seems unlikely, I’m going to assume they both suck, just like every other made-for-TV movie about Jesus Christ.

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This week’s movie is the action flick Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring Harrison Ford and a creative team that includes George Lucas and director Stephen Spielberg. With a pedigree like that, this is a surefire hit, right? Add to that the 94% positive review rating at rottentomatoes.com, and you can bet that I was looking forward to seeing this movie.

Here’s the nuts and bolts: Indiana Jones, archaeologist, professor, and adventurer, is called on to aid his country in 1939 when allied forces discover that the Nazis are looking for the legendary Lost Ark of the Covenant, and intend to use the power of God held within as a weapon in the coming war. Indiana must find the Ark before the Nazis do and return it to Washington D.C.

Sure thing, right? It’s got action, and I like action. It’s got mystery, and I like mystery just fine. It’s got groundbreaking special effects and globetrotting like you wouldn’t believe. This is a surefire hit, no question.

The only problem is, I didn’t like it. In fact, I kind of hated it.

Where do I begin. Well, the opening action sequence was great. I dug the treasure room with the traps, and it was a good laugh when Indy thought he got away with it. I saw the double cross coming, but it that didn’t take anything away from it, and I liked the setup of the rivalry and the escape on the plane. And that’s when it all started to fall apart.

I had some problems with the scene in the auditorium. Questions, really. These high ranking officials need to have an impromptu top secret meeting with Dr. Jones that no one can know about because it’s just too dangerous!!! So, obviously, the best place to hold the meeting is an auditorium with all the doors open and their voices echoing all over the place. The whole rest of the movie, I kept expecting that to come back as a plot point, but (spoiler warning) it didn’t.

Then Dr. Jones just happens to have a book with a picture of the Ark in it, even though he didn’t know they were going to be talking about that. And he turns right to the right page, without even having to look for it. Huh?

I don’t want to get too bogged down in one part of the movie, so let’s move on. Here are my notes from Marion’s third scene. I think it was when she found the monkey. “I do not like Marion. At all. She reminds me of the daughter [Audrey] in European Vacation.” The rest of the movie did nothing to change that opinion. If anything, it made me hate her even more. I know she was supposed to be the damsel in distress, but for goodness sake, I wish she had quit screaming for two seconds! The entire stupid movie it was “INDY SAVE ME!!!” this and “I HATE YOU DON’T YOU DO THIS TO ME!!!” that. Did she ever stop to think that maybe people kept putting a gag in her mouth to shut her up?

And why did she change into that dress? What’s-His-Name didn’t exactly have to twist her arm to get her to change, so what was the point? She said later that she was trying to escape, but it didn’t seem like it to me. I’m not sure how changing into the dress was supposed to help her.

Then there’s the monkey. I hate the monkey. There was no purpose in the monkey being in the movie. They did the reveal about two minutes after we first saw it, and then it was gone five or ten minutes later. There were a billion ways to write the monkey’s scenes without including the monkey and subjecting the audience to “Oh, he’s so cute” lines from screechy Marion.

I don’t want to make it seem like Marion was the movie’s biggest problem, because she wasn’t. So let’s talk about the Well of Souls and finding the Ark, shall we? First of all, awesome snakes. Seriously, I loved the snakes. And the room with all the skeletons? Thank you movie. It was awesome to see Marion buried in skeletons like that, even if she was screaming the whole time. There were problems, there, though. That whole section was so rushed that I think they wasted some of the potential they had with the scenario. I mean, Indy and Marion were trapped underground for five minutes! That scene alone should have been at least double that length. They could have cut some of the 20 minute or so chase across wherever they were out to make room.

Throughout the movie, the music was a bit much. I love John Williams as much as the next guy, but I wish Spielberg had pulled back just a tincture and trusted himself to direct the dramatic scenes without the safety net. To me, the score just became a distraction from the movie.

Also, maybe The A-Team and The Dukes of Hazzard have spoiled me for chase scenes. As I was watching the chase scene, I couldn’t help but hear Bo Duke shouting “Yeeeeeee-haaaaawwww!” Maybe, as one friend suggested, the movie’s just showing its age. Back in 1981, a lot of the effects in Raiders of the Lost Ark were groundbreaking, but they’d be considered an embarrassment if they were produced today. Looking at it that way, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that I’m not impressed 26 years after the movie was made.

There are other problems, but I think you get the point. I hate to end on such a negative note, so here’s something positive: Remember the part where a car went over a cliff? I’ve seen that done a million times (again with The A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard) but this one was easily the best.

Hopefully Mike Nelson and the crew at RiffTrax will take aim at Raiders of the Lost Ark soon. That’d get me to rent it again. Maybe.

Season 3, Bart’s Friend Falls in Love

Season 4, Mr. Plow

Also:

Season 6, Homer the Great

Season 9, Lisa the Skeptic

Season 11, E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)

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The first film I saw for this little experiment is Rear Window. I debated for awhile whether I should get something a bit further down the list instead of going after the greats, and in the end my curiosity won out. You have no idea how glad I am for that. Rear Window is everything I was hoping for and so much more.

Here we have an entire story told from the small apartment of L.B. Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart), an invalid bored into peeping in his neighbors’ windows. Nearly two hours of Jeffries looking out the window and observing what’s going on. He looks out the window, we see what he sees, then we see Jeffries’ reaction. How boring, how stale, how lifeless this must be.

And yet, Hitchcock made it work. Not just work, work brilliantly.

The basics of the story: Jeffries is a photojournalist laid up with a broken leg in the middle of a heat wave. From the window of his Greenwich Village apartment, he sees inside their apartments and suspects one of them of murder. Now if only he could prove it.

Three other players enter Jeffries’ apartment to share in his speculation. His girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (played by the divine Grace Kelly) is frustrated by his reluctance to marry her. His nurse, Stella (five time Oscar nominee Thelma Ritter) is frustrated by his attitude. And his old war buddy, Detective Doyle (Wendell Corey) is frustrated by Jeffries’ insistence that there’s been a murder in the first place.

It would be tempting to say that all the other characters in the film are inconsequential. With two brief exceptions they have nothing important to say. Usually their words are muffled and unintelligible. Most of the time their lives don’t seem to matter to the story. But upon reflection, it’s the believability of these strangers’ lives whose names we don’t even know that bring the film to life.

There’s the newlywed couple who spends all their time with the shade drawn. (Imagine this being done today. We’d have silhouettes of their writhing bodies and a steady soundtrack of moans and bedsprings squeaking.) There’s “Miss Torso”, the ballet dancer who stretches in the kitchen, just on the edge of being risqué. The frustrated composer is across the way trying to write his masterpiece. “Miss Lonelyhearts” is a failure at love and just upstairs a traveling salesman is arguing with his wife.

Alfred Hitchcock truly understood how to draw the audience in, how to pull them out of the theater and into the story. He used little things, things like these other lives that we can identify with and conspire with Jeffries to watch. Things like the lack of a musical score. That’s right, there’s no music to ratchet up the suspense just in case the audience doesn’t “get it”. Oh, there’s music, and sometimes it helps tell the story, but it’s always heard from across the courtyard in someone’s apartment, mixed in with car horns honking, sirens blaring, dogs barking, children fighting.

One touch that would be easy to overlook is the way in which Hitchcock made the audience draw conclusions with Jeffries. So much of the film is reaction that it was imperative that the audience be a co-conspirator with him. At the same time, it’s always important that the audience not be spoon-fed.

For example, the composer’s frustration is most clear when he’s vacuuming the rug in the middle of the night. In his underwear. He shoves the vacuum cleaner back and forth in front of the piano, then has a sudden inspiration. He stops the sweeper, and tries a new harmony on the piano, running back and forth from a chord to the troublesome next note. But it doesn’t work, so he goes back to sweeping. As the camera pans over the other buildings, we hear him trying again, pounding out the notes.

And so we see his frustration at being so close to progress on his piece. Situations play out with other characters, incidental and otherwise (I’m trying to stay relatively spoiler-free), so that Jeffries never has to say to himself, “Boy he sure is having trouble composing that piece of music.” A lesser filmmaker wouldn’t have been able to make it work, being either too vague or too explicit. Hitchcock knew the balance.

I’ve come all this way and I’ve barely mentioned the actors! Such a wonderful cast, I don’t know where to begin. I know Jimmy Stewart from his later life (mostly from Dana Carvey bits on Saturday Night Live), so finding him so powerful, even in this wheelchair, at age 46 was a surprise. Grace Kelly-what can I say? She’s a goddess. Lisa’s relationship with Jeffries was instrumental in making this film work. They exuded a special kind of love for each other, a comfortable love that was apparent in their every gesture, in every joke, even in their arguments. Thelma Ritter’s Stella is a good source of comic relief as well as being a source of wisdom in the film. I’d not heard of Ritter before; I’ll have to make sure her other films are on the Review List.

Hollywood doesn’t make films like this anymore. I’m still smiling from it, and I can’t wait to loan it out to friends. Make sure you get the restored Collector’s Edition. The script, which includes scenes that didn’t make it into the film, is included on the DVD-ROM.

Season 6, Bart of Darkness

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