Movie review catch-up

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

It’s not often that Hollywood manages to make a movie about girls coming of age that doesn’t involve 1) pregnancy, 2) someone getting ostracized, and 3) characters that are so flat you wonder out of what bin at central casting the lazy screenwriter got them. It doesn’t hurt that this film is from a book of the same name, the first of what is now three in a series.

Tibby (Amber Tamblyn, daughter of Russ of West Side Story fame), Lena (Alexis Bledel), Carmen (America Ferrera), and Bridget (Blake Lively) do embody some basic personality types – the cynic, the wallflower, the observer, and the risk-taker (respectively) – it’s true, but the skill of the actresses and the good will that is the heart of this film overcomes a fairly predictable series of events in each girl’s life. It’s nice to see girls that aren’t perfect, and who don’t expect their friends to be anything but what they truly are in their hearts. OK, so maybe it’s not realistic, but summer is the time of escapist fantasy is it not?

Visit the official site

Batman Begins

I admit it. I’ve always loved Batman. He’s dark, and slightly rough. He’s goth without the eyeliner and fingerless lace gloves and ridiculous frilly shirts. Batman is our worst impulses trained and harnessed for good.

Unlike Superman, who is an alien in the truest sense of the word, and unlike Spiderman, whose powers come from a mutation borne of scientific arrogance, Batman is just a guy. Albeit a rich one, but still, just a guy righteously angry at injustice, at the powerful taking advantage of the weak, at a system so corrupt that it really serves no one any longer, not even those trying to subvert it. He’s just a guy who does what so many of us have always wanted to do: give it to those who have it coming.

It doesn’t get much more escapist than that.

Strapped into the Batsuit, this time one made of kevlar^®, Christian Bale gives us a young Bruce Wayne, still tormented by his role in his parents’ untimely death. He’s made his way to what seems to be China, pursuing a strategy roughly summarized as do as those you would like to vanquish so you can know how they think. Found and trained by a mysterious mentor, Bruce returns to Gotham, to the graceful care of Alfred (Michael Caine, impeccable as always) and to the astonishment of the investment bankers who have been running Wayne Enterprises in the seven years since he disappeared.

Sparing revealing the plot, I’ll say just two things: 1)Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, showing about as much chemistry with Bale as she does with “real life” love interest Tom Cruise) is a plot device and completely unnecessary. She’s utter laziness on the part of writer David S. Goyer and writer/director Christopher Nolan (Momento), and 2) they got it almost completely right.

You can see in Bale’s performance the seeds of the tortured man that Bruce Wayne is to become. It’s easy to see, as well, the moral lesson and the optimistic idea that good can triumph over evil, that right can trump the profit motive. The one thing they missed, though, they got totally wrong. Let’s just say that the filmmakers should pay more attention to their bible when it comes to Jim Gordon’s family if they want this franchise to revive.

And not only was Batman Begins a mostly enjoyable ride (the setup first act and the chase scene go on a bit too long), we got a preview of Joss Whedon’s new film Serenity. Hey, I like a western in outer space as much as the next person seems to: The global box office for Star Wars is at $385M USD as I write this.

Visit the official site