Not with a whimper; but a bang

I saw The Dark Knight yesterday. I plan to see it again Monday morning on the IMAX screen at Pacific Science Center; I already have the tickets.

Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker is everything that has been touted; more, I believe. Ledger steals the film every second he is on the screen and his Joker is a masterful application of smoke and mirrors beyond any I have ever seen.

It is so unsettling, because there is nothing solid to hang onto; just when I thought, "I have a handle on this performance; I understand it.", Ledger ramped it up another notch. His Joker is a dangerous man not because he would just as soon kill you as look at you, which is so; not because he doesn't give a damn about anything, which is also true, but because he possesses a genius for manipulation and feels no compulsion against its use.

Listen to him explain the scars on his face, given at knife point, as he licks his lips and tastes the lie with his tongue, each time twisting the story to inflict the maximum horror upon his audience of one. Watch his eyes light up as he probes for an opponent's weakness or as he feeds someone their own regurgitated fear and anger.

When I was growing up, my teachers would have said this fellow didn't play well with others; today, some well-meaning psychologist would knowingly offer an Attention Deficit Disorder diagnosis.

Those are just more attempts to attach handles. Alfred, Bruce Wayne's butler, knows the truth. "Some men," Alfred says, "just want to see the world burn."

I learned to love comic books when I read what my son, who is now thirty, wanted to read, growing up. Batman has always been my favorite super-hero, perhaps because he had no special powers.

I went to see The Dark Knight because of that affinity and I enjoyed the film no end. But I will see it again and again, will buy the DVD, when it is available, because of Heath Ledger's Joker.

It is the performance of a lifetime.

Nickels and dimed

It would appear that Mr. McGuire was wrong.

He was that fellow, in The Graduate, who wanted to offer young Benjamin Braddock a single word of advice, claiming it was the wave of the future. That word was plastics.

It's a word we all have heard with regulatrity, for decades now, every time we go to the grocery store. You know. "Paper or plastic?" Seattle's Mayor Nickels wants us to start paying for the privilege to ask for plastic bags. He wants to get rid of those plastic foam containers most carry-out food comes in, too, and the plastic forks and knives and duck sauce packets.

The mayor's proposal, which is before city council now, and is expected to pass without difficulty, would ban foam containers at restaurants and grocery stores by 2010 and would impose a surcharge for the disposable plastic bags used at groceries, convenience stores and drug stores.

The mayor says it's intent is to better manage Seattle's impact upon the environment. Maybe he's right. I have seen studies that claim more than a billion single-use plastic bags go out the door of stores across the country every day.

And it is estimated that it will take one thousand years for a plastic bag to weather away. [Evil me; when I heard that, I couldn't help but picture some poor soul, sitting in a landfill, watching a bag full of who knows what, and putting a mark on a calendar for each day that passes.]

So, once the proposal becomes law, unless you take your own non-disposable bags to the market, you will pay twenty cents for each bag filled. Foam containers will be banned January 1, 2009, with restaurants still allowed to use plastic containers and utensils. Plastics will be verboten July 1, 2010, with carry-out in compostable containers only. A dime more for a dinner box; a nickel for cups.

Grocery-store and restaurant associations oppose the bag fee, of course, saying that now is not the time to add to consumer grocery bills. They are looking at their bottom line, too.

We all do, don't we? And we will get used to lugging our own bags to the grocery store, and buying carry-out a little less, even though we may complaint about it at first. Remember when the oil companies switched over to self-service pumps?

It's part of what it means to be human; we adapt. Even Mr. McGuire is probably handing out different advice these days. I wonder what his one word might be.

Be afraid, be very afraid

I don’t know whether to cringe in terror or laugh out loud at this one.

David Cronenberg, who has been making edgy movies since the sixties, some of them excellent (like last year’s Eastern Promises), some of them not-so-much (Scanners comes to mine), has decided to do an opera.

That, in itself, is not such a big deal, but it is based on his 1986 remake of The Fly. You remember that one, right? Jeff Goldblum, as scientist Seth Brundle, turned himself into a giant mutant human fly and scared poor Gena Davis half to death.

The opera is supposed to follow the line of the movie but has been re-imagined into the 1950s. Maybe that’s to explain Brundle’s horrible taste in clothes. Of course, he doesn’t have to worry about what he is wearing for most of the opera. It’s either filthy rags, as the monster, or nothing at all, when he crawls in and out of the teleportation device he invents. That's going to get a little chilly on stage.

The Fly: The Opera (or whatever they are calling it) is supposed to premier in September in Los Angeles. I wonder if they’re handing out free tickets yet?

Would you believe

We went to see Get Smart yesterday; I loved it. It’s like a fungus. Just a little fuzzy at first, but then it grows on you.

Of course, I walked into the theatre with mixed feelings. Get Smart was one of my favorite television programs, way back when. And in the first moments of the movie, my laughs were pure reflex. I wanted to like it, but it sounded like the producers had laid down the wrong chords, but then I settled into the rhythm of it. It was a standard Hollywood spy movie, with a world-saving plot and wowzer special effects, twisted until it fit into Maxwell Smart’s world.

No one does hapless but determined better than Steve Carell, and that’s how he plays Max. Not as the clueless but lucky bumbler from television, but as a bright man with a balance problem, a fellow who can lose the objective in the details, strong on theory but short of practice.

Carell is fast becoming one of my favorite actors. He can do broad comedy, or go for the joke that required thought, all the while presenting a character that you care for, and his Max is funny because he is in there, sometimes missing his intended target, by that much, but always trying as hard as he can.

A bit of monolog Max has in one scene says it all. “We have to look at them (KAOS agents) as people. Sure, they’re evil, but that’s what they do, not who they are.”

Anyway, there are genuine laughs, exciting action scenes, poignant moments, and Anne Hathaway (as Agent 99), beating the snot out of the bad guys, all the while looking sexy in dynamite outfits. Barbara Feldon couldn’t have done it any better.

Alan Arkin, as the Chief, and The Rock (I don’t care if he does want to be called Dwayne Johnson, he still looks like The Rock), as Agent 23, carry some of the weight, too, particularly when the Chief cold-cocks an annoying FBI agent and when Agent 23 demonstrates how to use a stapler. And James Caan is perfect as the POTUS, a man with a touch of southwest twang and no clue as to what is going on in the world.

What more can you ask from a summer movie? Get Smart; go see it.

Indiana who?

I broke down and went to see the Indiana Jones movie.

That would have been "the new Indiana Jones movie", except there was nothing new about it. Just because the Indy movies are based upon old Saturday morning serials doesn't mean they have for follow a formula. A tired formula, at that.

Production values were just plain lazy. The plot was full of holes, the script would have gotten an 'incomplete' if it had been turned in as an assignment for a college sophomore screen writing class; the actors all needed a good night's sleep (the makeup folks should have done something about the bags under Karen Allen's eyes), the special effects were slapdash and muddy and the final moments were stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark AND The Last Crusade.

Harrison Ford is a good actor, but his days as an action hero are long passed. During the motorcycle chase, I couldn't even pretend to believe the stunt man on the back of the bike, doing all those flips and falls, was Ford. And talk about phony; Cate Blanchett's Russian accent was awful, I expected to hear her to shout for Boris or Natasha, or scream, "Moose and squirrel must die!"

Was there anything I liked about the movie? The opening scene, with the old Ford hotrod was snazzy, and I would love to see the outtakes; it's got to be nothing but one actor starting to read a line and the others breaking into giggles.

Come on guys; enough is enough. Let Jones find a nice crypt somewhere, so that the poor guy can curl up and die.