Blog From The Bench

You may have already seen Warner Brothers' I Believe in Harvey Dent web site, which unveiled Aaron Eckhart as Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's sequel to his extremely kickass Batman Begins.

You may also have seen the various fanboy-created PhotoShop scam jobs purporting to show Heath Ledger as the Joker. Well, now we have the real thing, courtesy of Warner's I Believe in Harvey Dent, Too web site (very Joker -- you gotta love it). Here he is:

Beautifully sinister, if you ask me. The cheek scarring and deepset eyes are a horrorshow. I'm getting the sense the character's going to be a far cry from Cesar Romero -- or Jack Nicholson, for that matter.

Based on this little graphic in the latest e-newsletter from The Criterion Collection, it appears that we'll be seeing a DVD release of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring in '06:

Made in 1949, the picture traces the delicate emotional turmoil between a widower and his no-longer-so-youthful daughter (played by Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, who were both in Tokyo Story) when he pretends to marry in order to motivate her to leave home and start a family of her own. It's a great flick.

(Also posted at Stray Dog)

After a long career of milking his formulaic but sort of charming Tora-San series of domestic light comedies for all it was worth, writer-director Yoji Yamada is having a bit of a career renaissance in his seventies. His latest picture, 2004's The Hidden Blade (Kakushi-ken: Oni no Tsume) is a follow-up to 2002's internationally-acclaimed, Oscar-nominated Twilight Samurai, an outstanding tale of feudal strife at the beginning of the Meiji period. Anyone who's seen even a handful of the 48 Tora-san adventures shot between 1969 and 1995 won't be surprised that The Hidden Blade bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor: Yamada's career seems to have been built on the close and repeated study of social minutiae.

In Blade, a low-level samurai named Katagiri (Masatoshi Nagase, The Sea is Watching) is unwillingly sucked into intrigue when an ambitious friend, Hazama (Yukiyoshi Ozawa), is arrested for his involvement in a reform plot. Katagiri happens to be one of his clan's most formidable swordsman because of a "hidden blade" maneuver taught him by his now pacifist mentor. Hazama, naturally, is the one samurai who might be even more deadly than Katagiri. When Hazama escapes from captivity, and holes up at the foot of a mountain range, Katagiri is manipulated into facing off against his old friend.

If all of this sounds similar to the duel in Twilight Samurai, it is. Yamada appears to have become enamored with orchestrating scenes of mirror-image samurai in sadly fateful confrontations as a metaphor for the samurai class' self-destruction -- its devouring of itself -- during the Meiji period. There's no reason he shouldn't be smitten. The metaphor nicely encapsulates the themes he's exploring, and it's dramatically compelling on a literal level, too.

In another Twilight Samurai echo, The Hidden Blade also features an understated romance between Katagiri and his family's maid, Kie (Takako Matsu). The duo's love for one another goes unexpressed for years due to their class differences and Katagiri's general reticence with regard to matters romantic and/or erotic. It plays with the same sort of will-they/won't-they dynamic one finds in an Edith Warton novel...or a daytime soap opera...or Twilight Samurai. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you'll like it here; if you find it frustrating in The Age of Innocence, Yamada's picture might not be the piece of entertainment for you.

Though The Hidden Blade is built on the same plot skeleton as Twilight Samurai, it offers variation in emphasis and tone. There's more comedy here (some of it broad); slightly less emphasis on romance, and slightly more on clan intrigue. Those who liked Twilight Samurai as a well-performed though low-key chambara, will probably find The Hidden Blade redundant -- its pace is slower and it offers little we haven't already seen. Those interested in Japanese history, may find a poetic density in Yamada's subtle shifts in focus. It's as if he's performing an inch-by-inch exploration of Japan's cultural transition from feudalism in the Meiji restoration.

Unfortunately, Yamada once again demonstrates his nearly limitless capacity for clunky endings. The finale of The Hidden Blade is weaker by far than that of Twilight Samurai. It's so out of place, in fact, it almost undoes all of the gossamer beauty that's come before.

It's doubtful the aged Yamada has enough time to make 46 more variations on the samurai theme he's introduced. But based on his tenacious devotion to Tora-san, if he does by some miracle of genetics make it into his 140s, I'm sure we'll see many more pictures in the style of Twilight and Blade.

The Hidden Blade is not yet available on DVD in North America, but there's a solid Region 3 disc from Shochiku if you've got a player that can handle it. Colors are slightly muted here and there, but the image overall is quite beautiful. The original Japanese audio is offered in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround.

(Cross-posted on Stray Dog.)

How do you like them apples, double-dippers?

The good news is that it looks like The Criterion Collection will be saving us the folly of a double-dip with their release of Mr. Arkadin, the flick from which the quote above is taken (saving those of us who weren't suckered in by any of the crappy public domain discs out there, anyway). Three different versions of Orson Welles's 1959 butchered would-be classic will be presented on Criterion's three-disc The Complete Mr. Arkadin.

Here's the cover, newly posted on Criterion's site, where you can also check out the specs (just click the link above):

I can't wait to get my mitts on this one.

(Also posted at Stray Dog)

The Criterion Collection has posted their latest Focus piece, a long essay on actor Tatsuya Nakadai by Village Voice film critic Chuck Stephens. It's an excellent overview of one of Japan's most famous thespians. Nakadai's film career spans five decades and includes work with many of Japan's finest filmmakers, from Masaki Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy and Harakiri, to Mikio Naruse's A Woman's Life, to Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom, to Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha and Ran.

It's a great piece on a great actor. Check it out.

Links are also provided to a Nakadai filmography, the actor's eloquent eulogy for Kurosawa, and thoughts on Nakadai from Kurosawa and Kobayashi.

Here's a list of some reviews of Nakadai films here at DVD Verdict:

Yojimbo
Sanjuro
Harakiri
High and Low
Kwaidan
The Sword of Doom
Samurai Rebellion
Kill!
Zatoichi: The Fire Festival
Kagemusha
Ran

(Also posted on Stray Dog).

Just a note to Judge Bossig: Live 8 was about kicking off "The Long Walk To Justice," not stopping poverty.

Didn't you hear? Rock stars already stopped poverty 20 years ago with Live Aid. They've moved on, baby.

Bats.

We've finally got a Batman movie with bats. And lots of them.

Seeing the scene from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One in which a cornered Dark Knight calls in a thick, roiling cloud of bats as backup recreated on the big screen was one of the most thrilling moments of Batman Begins, and just one example of how Christopher Nolan and company have finally delivered a Batman movie that captures the atmosphere of the best years of the comic book. Finally.

I've only seen it once, but Batman Begins may be my favorite film adaptation of a comic book ever. My initial reaction, anyway, is that I liked it more than either of the X-Men movies. A lot more. And, unlike Richard Donner's mostly excellent adaptation of Superman, I liked it from beginning to end.

Critics are going on and on about how Begins is darker and more somber than the Burton/Schumacher series. That's true, but what impressed me is how perfectly they nailed the character of Batman/Bruce Wayne. As in the earlier series, there's a fine psychological line dividing Batman and Gotham's villains, but it's a clearly delineated line, one of which the Dark Knight is fully cognizant. Nolan and screenwriter David Goyer have returned Batman's nobility. No longer a Burtonesque wackjob seeking vengeance on behalf of his parents, he's a man pursuing justice, viciously but with a moral clarity capable of winning the trust of Gotham's only good cop, Jim Gordon. That Nolan and Goyer were able to rediscover Batman's nobility while shaping a characterization more complex than the Burton/Schumacher take is what makes Batman Begins so great. It flies in the face of the current comic book movie vogue that heroes must be weak, conflicted, morally confused. Batman/Bruce Wayne is strong and focused (though occasionally unsteady as he learns his trade), yet far more compelling a character than, say, Wolverine, or the quirky/nutty/disturbed Wayne of the previous Batman flicks.

On a technical level, Nolan does something incredibly interesting and thematically resonant. He gives us long looks at the individual pieces of Batman's costume -- we see lingering shots of the body armor, the mask, the gauntlets -- but he hides the caped crusader in action. Draping him in shadow, he keeps the camera a step behind as though the action sequences were shot by a documentarian unable to keep up with the Dark Knight's quick and unpredictable movements. When Batman's stationary, he's presented either in iconic silhouette, or tight close-up -- either way we never get a good look at the full costume on Wayne. As noted in various reviews, Nolan and Goyer establish a fairly firm logic to Batman's outfit and tools, and how he acquires them. What's not noted is how effectively this serves Nolan's expressionistic approach to presenting the crime fighter on the go. The whole man is bigger and more mysterious than the sum of his parts, and for the first time in a Batman movie we understand why criminals fear him. We had to take it on faith in Burton's version, but not in Nolan's. In Begins, Batman is a terrifying monster, and Nolan uses a lot of subjective camera work and sound design to emphasize the criminals' experience of him. Batman's Gotham debut takes place on a shadowy dock and feels like a scene from Alien; the criminals sweat bullets as they hear the inhuman skittering sounds of something moving all around them, and their cohorts are devoured by the dark. Later, when Batman questions Gordon's corrupt partner, Flass, we hear our hero's voice not as it is, but as Flass hears it -- and it's absolutely terrifying.

Batman Begins is the epic tale the character deserved, three hours of story squeezed into two by tight scripting and Nolan's honed skill at manipulating narrative time. Best of all, it feels like the Batman comics I read as a kid in the '70s: shadowy, mysterious, a little scary, and with touches of the surreal.

We finally have a Batman movie with Batman.

Moriarity's review of Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, posted yesterday at Ain't It Cool, has gotten me excited about the film. Not that I find Moriarity's opinion entirely reliable (isn't he the one who favorably compared Punisher to The French Connection?), but the points he makes mostly confirm my hopes that Nolan would deliver a Batman movie that finally does justice to the character.

Specifically, I'm enthused by his report that the film is genuinely scary, that it succeeds in giving us a criminal's-eye-view of Batman as a seemingly supernatural monster. He claims the picture is a hard PG-13, bordering on R. I hope I agree.

I don't read comic books anymore, but I like comic book movies for some reason. More accurately, I want to like them. I dig the rollercoaster thrill they provide, but am often disappointed with the laziness of the scripting, the sort of generic comic book template applied to the plots and characterizations of most entries in the genre. The substance of the extremely preliminary buzz on Batman Begins (from geeks and mainstream critics alike) suggests that Nolan and company may have defied all that, finally delivering a modern comic book flick that rivals the first two acts of Richard Donner's Superman (when I was a kid, I couldn't wait to get past the Clark Kent stuff and to Superman saving the day, but I found the third act corny and difficult to sit through when I revisited the picture as an adult). Granted, Richard Schickel panned Begins in Time, as did David Denby in The New Yorker. But Schickel's dis was on on the basis that the movie lacks a hammy villain like Nicholson's Joker (an asset in my opinion), and Denby seems to have an axe to grind over Nolan's "capitulation" to Hollywood. Most of the remaining reviews out there are positive. More importantly, they appear to be positive for all the right reasons -- an admiration for the tone, style, and substance of the picture.

Man, I hope the positive buzz is right. In any event, I'll be queuing up to see the movie come June 15, that's for sure.

That Desperate Housewives season finale was...well...I don't know. I didn't see it. I've never seen the show.

Like Judge Gibron, though, I've been lured into the gooey trap of Extreme Makeover - Home Edition. What is the deal with this show? What is its power? Damn it. The show sucks me and gets me all watery-eyed every time. See, they trick you with the promise of power tools and demolition, then sucker-punch you with sick children, fallen soldiers/firefighters/cops, and the destitute.

I swear, if I watch the show one more time I'm going to be hooked like it was sweet crack.

Saw Revenge of the Sith. Loved it. But this is no surprise since I didn't hate the first two prequels. I'll see it again, if only because my wife got caught in a traffic jam on her way to the theater and I had to go it alone. Have I mentioned how I love Atlanta traffic?...well, let's not get into that.

Despite my liking The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones well enough (hey, when I want great dialogue, I watch Mamet or Tarantino or Preston Sturges; when I want Wookiees and space battles and ass-kicking lightsaber duels, I watch Lucas), the midichlorian thing in Menace always bugged me. Why explain why Jedi kick ass? Who cares?

But Revenge of the Sith made the boo-boo all better.

STOP READING NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE FLICK; WHAT FOLLOWS MAY BE CONSTRUED AS A SPOILER

See, it ain't explicit, but there's enough in Ian McDiarmid's wicked performance during the opera scene for me to forever accept that he was Darth Plagueis's apprentice, that he murdered the old Sith, and that he manipulated midichlorians to create Anakin. After reading the script, I hoped he might come right out and say it in the film. After seeing McDiarmid's magnificent scenery-chewing in the finished film, I'm glad he didn't. It didn't need to be said; people can make of it what they will. As for me, Lucas may as well digitally revamp Return of the Jedi so Luke stands between the Emperor and the fallen Vader and says, "Leave Daddy alone, Grandpa!"

(All of this stuff may have been covered in some novelization or something, but I wouldn't know because the "Expanded Universe" is foreign to me. I can only enjoy Star Wars in a visual medium. I don't care to read about lightsaber duels. If there is some alternate explanation of things, don't bother me with it. My Star Wars universe consists of six films, and, like I said, I've decided how I'll view things moving forward.)

By the way, am I the only one who thinks Darth Sidious is the best screen villain since, well, that other Darth back in the '70s and '80s? He's a brilliant, scary litte bastard, ain't he?