Probably the biggest movie to open in theaters since last year’s 007 joint, literally as well as figuratively “dark” comic book movie The Batman does offer good reason to be seen on the big screen … if only because most folks’ home viewing circumstances will make it look like an indecipherable muddle. At 175 minutes, this franchise brick from writer-director Matt Reeves (of Cloverfield, the good US horror remake Let Me In, and two entries in the superior Planet of the Apes reboot series) gives you a whole lotta angsty only-one-man-can-save-this-godforsaken-society gloom for your money.
Not exactly dull, it’s nonetheless one long, monotonous pull, with the whole visual schema so murky that all the effortful, energetic stuntwork and action are just a blur of motion. We seldom can tell just what is happening to whom, let alone care. Robert Pattinson dons the cape here, his casting mattering only in that he has nice lips to poke out beneath that cowl. In the few scenes where he’s not wearing it, we know it’s him because he’s got the most fussed-over “unkempt” hair since his own Twilight movies. No one is allowed to have any fun here, not Andy Serkis’ butler Alfred, not Zoe Kravitz’s vaguely-lesbian-but-still-sexploitative frenemy Catwoman, not Colin Ferrell (under a ton of latex) as The Penguin or Paul Dano’s Riddler, whose villains aren’t even allowed fanciful costumes, lest that spoil the humorless “realism.”
The general mood is the depressive rain-soaked grimy urbia of Se7en, grisliness dialed down just enough to get a PG-13. This expansive, cheerless vengeance fantasy carefully sidesteps specific political stances, and does belatedly aim Bat-justice at militia-type extremists committing terrorist acts. Yet at the same time, its densely “whatever” concept of the diverse city as a “cesspool” mired in bottomless corruption feels close to Qanon-sense, pointing an accusing finger at a “legacy of lies and murder” that somehow only one other rich white dude can fix, maybe.
As with Joker, the messages are mixed, yet can all too easily be taken as dog whistles by exactly the sort of bad-penny fanboys for whom these two-dimensional pop culture behemoths are primary mythologies—like Zeus & co. were for the Greeks. This Batman does what it sets out to do with some skill. But I don’t have to like what it does. And, as a matter of fact, I don’t.
Not every movie house in the world (and none in Russia—thank you, Warner Bros.) will be showing The Batman. BAMPFA in Berkeley is starting two new series this weekend: Federico Fellini 100 (which runs Fri/4 through May 14) actually resumes the expansive retrospective of that Italian master that got interrupted by you-know-what two years ago, starting with 1952’s The White Sheik. The more compact Chinese Portraits (which runs Sat/5-March 17) offers four programs whose diverse films provide glimpses of the modern nation’s painters, writers, politics, and ordinary citizens.
Over at the Smith Rafael Film Center in Marin, David Gulpilil: Between Two Worlds provides a five-feature sampler from the five-decade career of Australia’s premier Aboriginal actor, who passed away three months ago at age 68. Playing Thu/3-March 24, it spans from his memorable debut in Nicolas Roeg’s 1970 Walkabout to 2013’s autumnal Charlie’s Country, one of several collaborations with director Rolf de Heer. (There will also be a documentary about Gulpilil in the upcoming Mostly British Film Festival, which we’ll preview next week.)
Other regular theatrical openings and streaming arrivals this weekend:
Sunless from Sundance: Genre Downers ‘After Yang,’ ‘Fresh’
Offbeat genre films got a lot of attention at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks back, and two of them are already hitting theaters. Freed from his mounds of makeup in The Batman, Colin Farrell stars in the domestically-scaled sci-fi drama After Yang, a second narrative feature from the video essayist who goes by the pseudonym Kogonada.
The Irish actor plays an upscale tea-shop proprietor raising an adopted child (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) with his wife (Jodie Turner-Smith), who’s also a busy professional. Partly to connect little Mika to her Chinese heritage, but also to lighten their own parental load, they’ve also utilized a humanoid household robot (Justin H. Min as Yang) who is both cultural educator and nanny. But when Yang suffers a “core malfunction” and cannot be repaired, Mika is inconsolable, and that which is lacking in their flesh-and-blood family become clear.
Like Kogonada’s prior Columbus, this is a meditative movie about ideas, if a slightly less successful one. It’s interesting, mournful, self-consciously hushed, a little monotonous and slack in narrative terms, but with a certain poetical lilt. Not entirely satisfying, its low-key mysteries nonetheless provide intriguing food for thought on how advancing technology might impact our emotions, and/or our disengagement from them. A24 is opening After Yang in theaters starting this Fri/4.
Considerably more in-ya-face is director Mimi Cave and scenarist Lauren Kahn’s Fresh, which starts out with single Noa (Daisy Edgar-Jones from Normal People) despairing of ever finding one nice, normal guy among the droves of dating-app creeps. Then she meets Steve (Sebastian Stan), who seems almost too good to be true. And, of course, he is. Suffice it to say that after letting down her guard one eensy bit, Noa finds herself in a horrific captivity situation—unimproved by realizing she’s not the only one, and that “Steve’s” unwilling long-term houseguests do not live to see freedom again.
A deliberately queasy mixture of cautionary tale, black comedy, cat-and-mouse intrigue, and grisly thriller, Fresh struck me as anything but—it hits notes familiar from everything between Silence of the Lambs and American Psycho. Yes, Noa is resourceful, and yes, some tables are eventually turned. But frankly I could do without ever seeing another “attractive young woman held hostage by sadistic perv” movie. The fact that this one was made primarily by women did not make it any more, well, appetizing. Its pretensions towards rising above exploitation-flick status are, in the end, simply pretentious, and this slick but archly derivative story really should not have required 114 minutes to be told. Fresh launches Fri/4 on streaming platform Hulu.
Lucy and Desi
By contrast, interviewee Lucie Arnaz starts out documentary Lucy and Desi about her famous parents by saying their story was all about “unconditional love”—though in fact comedienne Amy Poehler’s non-fiction directorial bow soon discovers plenty of conditions involved. Much of what’s here will be familiar to serious fans of I Love Lucy, a show that elevated the couple (and television itself) to hitherto unknown heights of popularity. But if the movie is not particularly inspired in assembly or insight, it nonetheless offers a satisfying glimpse of the real thing, particularly welcome to those who were underwhelmed by recent behind-the-scenes drama Being the Ricardos.
Lucille Ball’s sheer determination as well as ability is amply spotlit—despite considerable opposition, she insisted her Cuban bandleader husband be cast in the TV version of her successful radio comedy, because their careers had kept them apart for much of their marriage to date. But then the show’s ginormous success created such an empire that workaholic pressures ultimately drove them apart once again. It was their curse to each be gifted at (and compulsively dutiful towards) the business side of things, though neither of them enjoyed it much.
Still, they did love each other, and were pretty magical together in what surely remains the most beloved sitcom ever. Among the surprises sprung in Lucy and Desi’s fond-but-frank-enough overview is the fact that tough broad as she often seemed, Ball was also very supportive of other performers—in particular, Carol Burnett and Bette Midler appear here to relate how she went out of her way to offer them mentorship. The documentary begins streaming on Amazon Prime this Fri/4.
Huda’s Salon
One of the best movies of the last decade was Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, an intensely-involving fiction about a young Palestinian activist forced into becoming an informant. After a couple respectable-but-less-impactful interim efforts, the writer-director is very much back in that film’s thematic terrain with Huda’s Salon, a purportedly fact-inspired tale. Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) has taken a break from domestic toil and her husband’s possessiveness by bringing herself and their newborn to a West Bank hair salon in Bethlehem. But she’s scarcely had a sip of the coffee proprietress Huda (Manal Award) offers before she passes out, waking up hours later with baby beside her.
What happened? Something awful: A victim of blackmail herself, Huda has taken compromising photos of her drugged, unconscious customer-friend. She will show them to Reem’s jealously suspicious spouse (Jalal Masarwa) if the former doesn’t feed her info of interest to the Israeli Secret Service. The rest of the film charts the younger woman’s panic at her new circumstance, which promises harrowing danger whether she resists or cooperates. Meanwhile, Huda is soon abducted by the Palestinian authorites’ own secret police. Her interrogator (Ali Suliman) isn’t entirely unsympathetic to her plight, but at the same time provides little hope of escaping lethal consequences for her traitorous, predatory acts.
Cutting between those two crisis strands, Huda’s Salon is structurally repetitious as well as a bit stagy. Omar managed something similar in much more cinematically-fluid terms, perhaps in part because its male protagonist lives a much freer existence even under Occupation. Still, if his new film is hardly in that earlier one’s class, Abu-Assad’s latest ekes potent melodramatic tension from the ease with which ordinary lives can be upended within a framework of profound political injustice. It opens in limited theaters beginning Fri/4.
