Went and saw the midnight opening of The Dark Knight Thursday and it was awesome, everything that has been said about Heath Ledger’s performance is true. It is an incredible piece of acting and I seriously doubt that anyone can now play the character. Ledger makes Jack Nicholson’s earlier performance look as campy Caesar Romero’s from the old Adam West show. I don’t know what inner demons he drew on to create The Joker but it is an intense performance that is both scary and funny, that actually makes you like and even admire him despite all the horrible and sadistic things he does. The problem is that he is so good he overshadows the other great performances in the film. Christian Bale has cemented his place as Batman, like Ledger, no one else could ever play him now. Gary Oldman is quietly effective as Lt./Commissioner Gordon, investing an underused character with intelligence and simple dignity. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives dimension to a character who’s only purpose in the film is as a plot device. Almost never mentioned is Aaron Eckhart’s equally effective performance as the tragically fated Harvey Dent/ Twoface, portraying a conflicted man who wants to do good but ends up becoming the very thing he had originally fought against. Like Ledger he makes you understand and feel sympathy for a monster who does horrible things (as well as erasing the bad memory of Tommy Lee Jones’ less than stellar take on the character).
Archive for July, 2008
I’m Benny Hill fan from way back, catching him in syndication in the early eighties, I watched his show through much of junior high and high school. So when I saw the library had an old movie of his from the fifties called Who Done It? and it was produced at Ealing Studios, who made all of those great Alec Guinness comedies like The Lady Killers and The Man In the White Suit, I immediately checked it out and tried to avoid recklessly driving home to pop it in the VCR, only to be ultimately disappointed with the film.
Benny plays Hugo Dill, an inept extra at an ice follies show who is addicted to pulp detective stories, he destroys the show through an unbelievable set of contrivances and gets fired. But not to worry, he has also just won a hundred dollars and a bloodhound in a contest sponsored by his favorite magazine. Rushing out he quickly purchases a gun and sublets an actor agent’s old office, hiring as secretary one of the chorus girls he also got fired, not knowing she is also a professional strong woman. His first client turns out to be a woman looking for stage work because her last agent dropped her for being too old, only Dill thinks it’s a divorce case, made worse for him when he spies the man with his new secretary, who was looking for stage work. All this confusion brings him to the attention of some foreign spies who have an embassy across the street from the agent Dill is spying on. They hire him to impersonate a scientist they are trying to sneak out of England, they plan to kill Dill and make it look like the scientist is dead.
While the plot is serviceable and Benny gives it his all, the film unfortunately falls completely flat. The reason is obvious, instead of scripting a film around Hill’s talents, he is thrown into a hodge podge of detective and spy cliches and forced to play it straight. Ealing seemed only interested in casting him due to his TV celebrity (his long running show had premiered on BBC the previous year). Even worst is that Benny is portrayed as an idiot, something he never did on TV. His characters may have been accident prone or seem to suffer at the hands of fate, but they were never this bone headed stupid. Part of his appeal was the clever and unorthodox way he would get out of scrapes, here he just blunders in and is constantly rescued by his super strong girl Friday, heck she’s even the one who figures everything out, Benny ends the film as oblivious as when he started.
The only real interest in getting this film is to see Benny at the start of his TV career or if you are a die hard completest. Everybody else should stick to his Thames TV show.
I was reading David Gilmour’s The Film Club last week, it’s a memoir of a three year period he spent where he allowed his troubled teenage son to drop out of high school without worrying about getting a job, all he had to do was watch three movies a week that his father chose. The book itself is about how the two bonded over those three years while his son began to build a life for himself. It’s a bittersweet and poignant book about teaching your child what you think is important to having a good life and then letting them go.
Not having any children, the one part that resonated with me was when Gilmour showed his son Giant and went into excited detail about a pivotal scene in the film where Rock Hudson and his cronies are trying to pressure James Dean into selling off a parcel of land he has just inherited from Hudson’s sister. Dean refuses and then makes this dismissive curving swipe gesture to them. Gilmour’s description and obvious love for this scene brought back a ton of happy memories from college.
I was a bit of an outcast back in the eighties, being an old movie buff. I had some friends who shared a liking for them as well. One friend in particular was a James Dean fanatic, and felt it was his mission in life to turn on as many people as he could to the greatness of the late actor. He succeeded quite well in our little group, most became as fanatical as he was. I unfortunately, as always, did not, preferring Humphrey Bogart to James Dean (though to be honest I was a bit of an outsider even within the group as they were predominantly theater majors and I was in broadcasting). But it was hard not to get caught up in Paul’s excitement and I was as initially captivated by Dean’s inner tortured on screen personae as the rest. When he showed us Giant, we all really got into the aforementioned scene. Then Paul started using Dean’s swiping gesture as a greeting, which we all quickly picked up and it became our secret sign, only used to greet others in the group.
As all things happen when you get caught up in an outgoing person’s interest, when they are no longer around giving it constant reinforcement, your own interest in it fades, after college we all drifted apart and my interest in Dean drifted with it back to Bogie (I had a similar experience ten years ago with a friend who was a Pro-Wrestling fanatic). But the memory remains and every now and then I will make the gesture to myself and smile in nostalgia.
