The Dark Knight Rises

I saw The Dark Knight Rises while staying home with a sick child.  Consequently, I saw it in two sessions while my little one slept.  I spent the film’s entire 2.5-hour running time with my finger on the volume control.

The problem, at least with the film’s BluRay release, lies in the sound mixing.  The gunfire and explosions are so loud in comparison with the dialogue that I felt it was giving me a choice between waking my son during the action sequences or understanding the dialogue during the rest.  If you live in an apartment or share space with people who don’t wish their living room to sound like Armageddon, be warned.

On to the movie.  The Dark Knight Rises asks the filmic question: what if the Occupy people get their wish?  Its answer: French Revolution 2.  Despotism.  Kangaroo Courts.  Chaos.  Only the rich, working anonymously and unfettered from the rule of law, can protect the cringing middle class from the depredations of the fickle mob.

I’m not even a hippie, and I could see that message as if it were carefully painted in Sterno on an icy bridge in the middle of the night and set afire because some rich guy thought it would look cool.

Ok, but is the film any good?  Well, it does move along at a speedy clip, the freakishly beautiful Anne Hathaway actually made me forget about Michelle Pfeiffer for a good two hours, the rest of the cast turns in respectable performances in none-too-demanding roles, and lots of stuff blows up real good.  In other words, you get what you paid for.

Just keep your finger on that volume button.

Midnight in Paris

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Paris, and those who have never been. Woody Allen loves Paris, and Midnight in Paris is his song.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood writer who gets paid decent money to crank out stuff like Cheaper by The Dozen 2, but really wants to create serious literature. He's in Paris with his odious fiancée and her odious parents. He wants to move there, as any reasonable person would, and she's horrified by the idea.  {IMPORTANT NOTE: If your significant other can't see her/himself living in Paris, run.  Run as fast as you can.}  But here's the twist: he doesn't just want to live in Paris: he wants to live in the Paris of the imagination of a college-prep high schooler. This is a man who has read A Moveable Feast so many times that he wills himself a seat at the table. Literally. The Fitzgeralds are delightful. Hemingway introduces him to Stein, who likes his work. He's ecstatic, and that's even before Marion Cotillard shows up. Suddenly, Odious Fiancée seems very far away, indeed.

And now we're in the love letter to a city, a time, and the very idea of cities and times and possibilities that may, just may, lie within our grasp. It's capital R Romantic stuff, and Woody makes it sing. Though the film has a jarring propensity to name-check just about everyone in A Moveable Feast, we forgive it because it's so earnest, so Romantic, so in love with its time and its people and its possibilities, and so beautiful. Paris, past and present, looks absolutely charming.   It glimmers in the rain and it holds manifold and wonderful possibilities.  Its denizens look like just the sorts of a people an imaginative man would hope to meet.

Me - I love Paris. I love the way city lights look when reflected on wet cobblestones. I love possibilities. And I love my wife's dog-eared copy of A Moveable Feast.  Midnight in Paris hit me right between the eyes. If you love Paris, I bet it'll work for you, too.

Contagion

I used to work at a place that did professional wargaming.  Not the kind with little paper chits and 20-sided dice, but the kind in which we got a bunch of smart and capable people in a room, threw them a scenario, and analyzed how they did (or didn’t) work together to deal with the situation.  Contagion feels like a dramatization of one of those wargames.

The scenario: a highly contagious, deadly virus comes out of Macau, borne abroad by several of the thousands of international travelers who pass through in a given week.  It propagates around the world exponentially.  Player #1: you’re an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.  Player #2: you’re the head of the CDC.  Player #3: Homeland security.  Player #4: a suburban city councilwoman at the American center of the epidemic.  Go.

Does it work in the film?  Yeah.  Likeable stars like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, and Lawrence Fishburne put faces to dilemmas, helping us humanize the scope of the epidemic and empathize with their respective ethical and professional challenges.  The stories weave together fluidly, each informing the others and catching us up in their combined narrative.  The film rockets along and never feels like the dull procedural it could have become.  Contagion challenged and fascinated me, making me feel like I was back in the room of one of those wargames, moving things along and learning from the process.

Grim as the film’s subject matter surely is, I found it to be intellectually and emotionally satisfying.  I walked out thinking, “That’s how it could really play out.  Nice work.”  I haven’t changed my mind, even if I have changed my habits: I’m washing my hands more.