Robert Pattinson

Review of “The Batman”

Parents are the multi-headed beasts of all our lives.  When we are young, for most of us, they are our protectors and heroes.  Then for many, they become our antagonist when we enter our teenage and young adult years.  Then, when we are adults out of the house, some of us learn two things about the folks:  They were fallible humans doing the best they could, and they are pretty good people.  I know many grew up in awful, abusive environments with selfish, toxic parents who could not care less about raising their kids.  Fortunately, I was raised by two relatively normal people.  Each had their faults and shortcomings, but overall, they were good people.  My mom was a sweetheart and my security blanket growing up.  Dad could be gruff and didn’t understand having a son that preferred watching TV to helping him work on a car engine.  As they got older, their roles reversed, with my mom being more critical of my weight and career choices and dad being far more laid back about everything.  Neither deserved the way the end of their lives turned out.  Dad developed Alzheimer’s and slowly drifted away over seven years, becoming more and more of something that resembled a zombie than a man who could pull out, repair and install a car engine.  Mom was his primary caretaker all through that battle.  Then, shortly after he passed, her colon cancer returned in her liver.  She died less than a year after dad.  Neither were powerful figures in our community, and nothing has come out in the 20 years since their deaths to show there were anything buy a husband, wife and parents trying to keep a roof over their heads and their kids warm, fed and educated.  Things are a bit more complicated for a certain billionaire orphan in the gritty, crime-filled city of Gotham in “The Batman.”

Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) in his disguise as the Batman has been patrolling the streets of Gotham City for two years.  Criminals and citizens alike know the bat symbol shining on the city’s ever-present clouds means the vigilante could be anywhere, prowling in the shadows looking for criminals to beat up.  Gotham City Police Detective Jim Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) involves Batman in some of his investigations, much to the chagrin of his superiors.  When Gotham City Mayor Don Mitchell, Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) is murdered by an enigmatic killer calling himself Riddler (Paul Dano), Gordon brings Batman to the crime scene, angering Police Commissioner Pete Savage (Alex Ferns), but the killer left Batman a card containing a riddle and an encoded answer.  Batman solves the riddle and knows the coded answer may be the key to a larger cypher of the killer.  More of Gotham City’s elite become victims of the Riddler and they all may be connected to the city’s crime gangs and the drug trade.  Selina Kyle (Zoe Kravitz), a waitress at the Iceberg Lounge, run by a criminal nicknamed Penguin (Colin Farrell), catches Batman’s eye as she works.  He follows her to her apartment and watches as she comforts a distraught young woman.  Batman recognizes her as a woman seen in photographs with Mayor Mitchell who appears to be beat up and bleeding.  Catching her during a break-in, Batman and Selina form an uneasy partnership, trying to get to the bottom of the connection of Riddler’s victims and how all of Gotham’s secrets could rip the city apart.

“The Batman” was almost a very different movie.  It was originally conceived as a part of the Zack Snyder DC Extended Universe (DCEU) that included “Man of Steel,” “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Justice League.”  Ben Affleck would continue in his role as Batman.  He would also write and direct.  As the “Snyderverse” began to implode after the colossal failure of “Justice League” as redesigned by Joss Whedon, the whole idea of a connected DC movie universe began to fall apart.  The successes of “Wonder Woman,” “Shazam” and “Aquaman” as stand-alone films with sequel potential, and Affleck deciding to give up being Batman, meant Warner Bros. could create profitable franchise movies that didn’t need to follow the model set by Disney and Marvel with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).  Affleck left the film as both director and star, and director Matt Reeves was brought in to remold the story in a new image, focusing on a younger Batman trying to figure out how best he can protect the people of Gotham.  It was more focused on the detective side of the character with limited big action set pieces. 

The casting of Robert Pattinson was met with a great deal of internet skepticism, including from myself.  How could the sparkly vampire actor pull off a gritty, violent, broken creature like Batman.  The collective internet owes Mr. Pattinson an apology as his portrayal is everything we didn’t know we wanted from the Dark Knight.  The broken, gaunt appearance of Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is something even the best comic book writer and artist would have difficulty creating on the page.  This Batman is a hollow shell, filled with rage and taking it out on the criminals of Gotham’s dark, rain-soaked streets. 

Pattinson’s first appearance in the suit is the oft-seen fight between Batman and some thugs in clown face paint.  He beats down the lead punk and says, “I’m vengeance.”  They then surround him and, while he eventually wins, he takes some punches that leave the final outcome in doubt.  This Batman isn’t the seasoned martial artist and fight tactician we normally see.  He’s also not in a close and loving relationship with Alfred, played by Andy Serkis.  They are frequently at odds, with Bruce saying, “You’re not my father” as one point.  This Bruce Wayne is angry, somewhat spoiled, and certain he can fight crime his way, without anyone’s guidance.

Much of Pattinson’s performance is in the script by Matt Reeves and Peter Craig, who approach this Batman as a work in progress.  He’s still dealing with the loss of his parents after 20 years and has ignored everything else in life except his need to punish villains.  This is the Batman hinted at in other portrayals by Michael Keaton and Christian Bale, but Pattinson, via Reeves and Craig’s script, puts the pain on his face in every frame.

The performances of the main and supporting cast are remarkable.  Colin Farrell, buried under prosthetics and a fat suit, is unrecognizable as Penguin.  Even his voice appears to have a costume as his Irish accent is nowhere to be found.  Zoe Kravitz also plays pain well as Selina Kyle/Catwoman.  Her sad backstory is its own subplot.  Pattinson and Kravitz have a sizzling chemistry that needs more exploration.  Jeffrey Wright is a fun Jim Gordon.  He knows he’s breaking all the rules letting Batman into crime scenes, but if it gets the job done, he doesn’t care.  His character will feature in a spinoff show about GCPD on HBOMax.  Paul Dano’s Riddler is a wonderous creation.  He’s clearly insane, brilliant and, like Batman, broken, but in a different, evil way.  Dano plays these off-kilter characters so well I wonder about his sanity.

“The Batman” is rated PG-13 for strong violent and disturbing content, drug content, strong language, and some suggestive material.  There are numerous fights, beatings and killings but most are bloodless.  Batman is shot several times with guns and a shotgun, but his suit is bulletproof.  There’s an R-rated film bubbling just under the surface.  A drug called “drops” that are dripped in the eyes is shown being used.  Alcohol is also shown being consumed.  The suggestive material features Batman watching Selina changing into her cat suit.  She is shown in her underwear.  Foul language is scattered and mostly mild, but there is one use of the “F-word.”

The story is a bit convoluted with the crimes all leading to a massive action scene that left me thinking about our current political situation and misinformation on the internet.  I promise, that will make more sense after you see it.  By the end, I was satisfied all the loose ends had been wrapped up with the film leaving a bread crumb or two about a possible villain for the sequel.  If this is the first of a trilogy of Batman films, I feel certain the Dark Knight is in good shape to continue as a flawed beacon of justice that drives a badass car.  He just needs a few more of those wonderful toys.

“The Batman” gets five bat-shaped stars out of five.

Follow, rate, review and download the podcast Comedy Tragedy Marriage. Each week my wife and I take turns picking a movie to watch, watch it together, then discuss why we love it, like it or loath it. Find it wherever you get podcasts.

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Review of “Tenet”

A CIA operative known only as the Protagonist (John David Washington) is given a case to prevent a third world war. Working with another agent, Neil (Robert Pattinson), he must infiltrate the operation of Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) by going through his art dealer wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki). The war the agents are trying to prevent is one that won’t be fought with conventional or nuclear weapons; this war will be fought using the flow of time. Someone has figured out a way to control entropy, changing the normal order of cause and effect. If a government or terrorist group could observe the events of the future, they could counter any efforts to stop their plans. The past, present and future are at stake.

Trying to explain the story of “Tenet” is like teaching a squid how to write. It’s complicated, messy and I don’t think I have the intelligence to grasp it all. Writer and director Christopher Nolan has crafted a bizarre and labyrinthian story of technology, power and greed with the fate of the world in the balance. I won’t be surprised if audiences are deeply divided in their opinions on the film with some thinking it’s a masterpiece while others find it taxing and incoherent. Both will be correct. Much like cause and effect are reversed in the film, feelings about it will also travel in both directions. While struggled as I watched the movie and the alternating passage of time, sometimes occurring simultaneously, I felt the door to a level of understanding crack ever so slightly as the events played out. I happen to be one that thinks “Tenet” is brilliant.

That doesn’t mean it is flawless. The dialog can be dense when characters are discussing the finer points of entropy and how the rules of one person traveling in one direction while the rest of the world is moving in another. And perhaps it was the speaker set up in the theater, but I had a hard time understanding what characters were saying from scene to scene. Maybe it was the ambient background noise on the soundtrack mixed with the various accents, but some of the dialog was garbled and lost to me.

Otherwise, the movie is also unbearably loud. The action scenes with guns, explosions and car crashes left my ears ringing. I would have chocked that up to my individual theater, but I’ve seen other viewers post how near deafening the volume is. This appears to be a deliberate choice by Nolan and the studio to crank up the sound and beat the audience into aural submission. If you have especially sensitive hearing or suffer from hearing loss, you may want to bring ear protection just in case.

Have you ever had a TV show suggested to you and the suggester says, “It really gets good by episode 3,” or “The second season is where it takes off”? That’s kind of how “Tenet” is. Things won’t make much sense in the early scenes, and you’ll wonder if Nolan has let you down with a subpar effort. However, visuals you’ll find confounding will make more sense as you go through the story. By the end, scattered and random events early will finally become clear. Nolan has made a movie that is the epitome of the conspiracy theorist cork board with pictures, headlines and random pieces of paper covered in scribbles connected with push pins and red string.

While the story takes some time to make sense, the performances will hold your interest until your brain catches up. While the film is filled with characters, our four main players dominate the screen and ably so. John David Washington keeps his character’s emotions in check, just as a seasoned CIA operative would. While he’s facing an unprecedented situation, Washington’s Protagonist rolls with it. While some may criticize his performance as dull, I found his ever in control operative to be a source of calm in a temporal storm.

Debicki, Pattinson and Branagh provide all the emotion for the film. Debicki’s Kat is a woman in a loveless marriage to a cold and cruel man holding their son as leverage over her. Her flares of anger and pain ring so true they caused me to wince. Pattinson provides a bit of comic relief as Neil. Allowed to speak with his British accent, Pattinson’s Neil is droll and a tiny bit condescending while also being a master of understatement. Neil is the Protagonists fixer, gofer and sounding board. His role is to give the CIA operative the tools and materials he needs to do the job. Providing a laugh along the way is a bonus. Branagh’s Sator is a fairly standard villain but provides flashes of the madness and cruelty that make him rise above. Branagh slinks through some scenes like a python approaching his prey. In other scenes he’s brash and big like a bull elephant charging through the African plains. While the role doesn’t provide much meat on the bone, Branagh strips it clean and makes a meal from the part.

“Tenet” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some suggestive references and brief strong language. There are fights, shootings and crashes of various types throughout the film. Gore is kept to a minimum even during a scene of torture. A 747 is crashed into a building. A couple of people are shot at close range. A person is beaten to death with an unusual object. Foul language is scattered and mild except for one F-Bomb.

The action scenes in “Tenet” are unconventional but thrilling. Some of them happen in regular time while others are going backwards. Some scenes have some of the characters traveling in one direction while others in the same scene are going backwards. Nolan filmed the actors doing the scenes forward and backward so he could splice the two together as seamlessly as possible. For the most part it works, but sometimes people are clearly running backward and then had the film reversed and vice versa. Those moments are rare and don’t ruin what is otherwise a very good film. I would have liked a clearer understanding of what’s causing the reversal of time and would also have liked a better reason for why the bad guys wanted to fulfill their ultimate goal. That said, “Tenet” is a brain-breaking sci-fi/action/thriller that, if you’re comfortable heading to the theater, should be seen on the big screen. Just remember to wear your mask.

“Tenet” gets four stars out of five.

Release schedules are still thin so my return to reviewing may be erratic for the foreseeable future.

Listen to Comedy Tragedy Marriage, a podcast about life, love and entertainment, available wherever you get podcasts. Follow me on Twitter @moviemanstan and send emails to stanthemovieman123@gmail.com.

Review of “The Lighthouse”

Thomas Wake and Ephraim Winslow (Willem Defoe and Robert Pattinson) are two men stationed at a remote lighthouse on a stormy, rocky island. Wake has a bum leg, so he can’t serve on ships anymore. Winslow is a young man looking for his purpose in life. Wake makes clear that, during their four-week assignment, he will take care of the light and orders Winslow to take care of all other tasks. These tasks include feeding coal into the boiler that blows the foghorn, refilling the oil that powers the light, and general household maintenance. The pair don’t get along and Winslow is hoping to get through the assignment and get paid. As their assignment is nearing an end, Winslow kills a seagull that has been tormenting him. Wake had earlier warned Winslow to not kill a seabird as they are the souls of dead seamen. The wind shifts and a storm begins, delaying the pair leaving the island.

I’ll admit. That plot synopsis for “The Lighthouse” doesn’t sound very interesting. I have intentionally left out some parts of the story as to not give away too much as the movie is best experienced with as little advance information as possible. To be honest, telling you more about the film wouldn’t help much as the feelings and emotions of the film can only be experienced by viewing. I don’t know exactly how I feel about the film from the same director of “The Witch,” but I’ll see if I can reach a conclusion by the end of this review.

The performances of Willem Defoe and Robert Pattinson are amazing. There’s no hint of fear or resistance as the pair strips away all semblance of modernity and totally inhabit the time and lives of these two men. Defoe delivers a speech midway through the film that is an amazing bit of manic acting. Defoe’s Wake is berating Pattinson’s Winslow for being ungrateful and not liking Wake’s cooking. The speech is a curse, delivered unblinking and with the intensity of a laser. Defoe’s performance turns on a dime, switching from parental, to cruel, to insane, to friendly, to intimate. It is a wonder of acting.

Pattinson is an equal while being opposite of Defoe. Winslow just wants to get through his time and get paid, but Wake pushes him to talk, to drink alcohol (despite that being against regulations) and treats him more like a slave than an equal. Pattinson delivers a controlled performance, making his decent into madness all the more affecting. Winslow is the character you feel the most empathy with through most of the film. There comes a point where that begins to change as both Winslow and Wake are suffering from the stress of being stuck together on a small island, constantly bombarded with storms, with no escape. It wouldn’t surprise me if both are nominated for Oscars.

The film is a visually fascinating. The two most obvious things are the aspect ratio and that it’s in black and white. According to the film’s IMDb page, director Robert Eggers wanted the film to look similar to the earliest movies, including shooting it with old cameras and in the aspect ratio of the first films. The image is almost square. The regions of black on each side of the screen gives the film a feeling of claustrophobia and adds to the isolation of the characters.

Shooting “The Lighthouse” in black and white cements the film in the period. While it wouldn’t have been impossible to use color film, black and white provides authenticity and creates a starkness to the image amplifying the other worldliness of this story. Using color stock might have blunted the griminess and dread of this location. Watching a stormy sea of blue water would limit how depressing and angry the roiling ocean looked. The walls of their quarters stained a brownish yellow from pipe and cigarette smoke and oil lamps would give just a hint of happiness in an otherwise joyless existence. Black and white is almost a character in “The Lighthouse.”

“The Lighthouse” is rated R for sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing images, and some language. There is a disturbing scene of Winslow killing a seagull (it was a rubber stand in but still troubling). There are a couple of scenes of Wake and Winslow fighting. We see a character’s head in a lobster trap as well as a character having his intestines picked at by seagulls. We see a woman’s breasts a couple of times, as well as both Wake and Winslow naked. There are a couple of scenes where a character masturbates but we don’t see his penis. There is a brief sex scene. There are a couple of farts heard. Foul language is scattered.

A card at the end of the credits says some of the dialog was taken from the writings of Herman Melville and quotes from the diaries of real lighthouse keepers from the period. Much like Eggers’ “The Witch” that took quotes from journals, diaries and court records from the time when the film was set, “The Lighthouse” is filled with words and phrases that are unknown to modern audiences. All this makes the film that much more authentic, tense and weird. Eggers’ films are just weird. The weird of “The Witch” didn’t work as well for me as it plodded and didn’t provide any scares. “The Lighthouse” masterfully creates a huge amount of tension as the build-up to the explosion of violence and madness the audience knows is coming builds like a pressure cooker. We’re never sure when it’s going to blow, and we even have moments of hope, but the inevitable destruction of these two characters is just a matter of time. This film will be polarizing as some won’t understand the point of the picture size, black and white, the language of the script and more. But if you’re looking for something Martin Scorsese would approve of; you should see this film.

“The Lighthouse” gets five stars.

A whopping five new films open this week and I’ll see and review at least one of the following:

Terminator: Dark Fate—

Motherless Brooklyn—

Arctic Dogs—

Harriet—

Parasite—

Listen to Comedy Tragedy Marriage, a podcast about life, love and entertainment, available wherever you get podcasts. Follow me on Twitter @moviemanstan and sent emails to stanthemovieman123@gmail.com.