Ambrose & Elsewhere

I rewatched Batman Returns recently. It’s a visually beautiful movie. It reminded me constantly of an over-the-top production of an opera–an impression helped along by a lushly operatic soundtrack by Danny Elfman. For visual effects CGI can’t rival, the movie has the young Michelle Pfeiffer, frequently in skin-tight rubber, if you like that kind of thing–and Michael Keaton with a collagen-assisted beestung lip, if you like that kind of thing. Every scene is a visual explosion: whether it’s the most spectacular Batsignal-hits-the-sky scene ever filmed, or thugs machine-gunning a Christmas tree, or a hundred cats licking a shattered Selina Kyle as she lies convulsing in an alleyway, or myriads of penguins mounted with rocket-launchers converging on downtown Gotham, or a gigantic rubber duck floating ceremoniously through a dark sewer big enough to be a train-tunnel. Everything is wildly vivid, oversize, Gothic, stylized, intense.

And, apart from that, everything is boring.

Continue reading Batman Strikes Out, and 2 Pix

The Adjustment Bureau, like every third movie out of Hollywood these days, is based on a Philip K. Dick story I haven’t read (in this case “Adjustment Team”). I have to admit that the Great Dickening of our times baffles me a little: I like the PKD I’ve read, and I think The Man in the High Castle is genuinely great. But I never read something by him and say, “I have to rush out and buy and read and reread everything this guy has written NOW NOW NOW RIGHT NOW!” More evidence that the Zeitgeist and I aren’t on speaking terms, I guess. I never really got HPLolatry either.

I had no idea what The Adjustment Bureau was about before I went, and you may prefer to experience it in a similar state (if you haven’t already) so consider this a spoiler warning. But it’s a good movie: not dumb, intriguing, fast-paced, beautifully produced and acted, with something to say on the issue of free will vs. fate. That’s more than we can expect from Transformers 3. (Or Thor, for that matter, with its Norse gods inexplicably mouthing BBC-approved vowels.)

Continue reading Putting the Just in Adjustment