Michael Caine: Will do anything for $10 million. (PMc)

Has everyone read Melena Ryzik's crackerjack profile of prolific actor Sir Michael Caine in The New York Times? It's pretty great! He explains his "eye trick" for looking at both a camera and subject simultaneously, the weird back-story he made up for Alfred in Nolan's Batman series (though it's pretty inconsistent, since he talks about Bruce Wayne meeting Alfred in a military mess hall, when we all KNOW that Alfred has been with the Wayne family since before Bruce was born, no d'uh), and how he slept with all of Hollywood and everything before falling for his wife after seeing her in a commercial for Maxwell Coffee.

But there was one specific quote of Caine's, seemingly benign, that made us believe both he and the Times were in on the most famous joke about the actor.

The last line of the piece ends with Sir Michael Caine talking about his future roles. "For $10 million I’ll do a movie. But nobody’s offered me that yet. I look at e-mail every morning to see."

Which reminded us of this ubiquitous British joke that actor Cary Elwes told during a Loveline episode in 2004, when he was promoting Saw.
(Clip starts at 1:02)
http://youtu.be/maHAQdl4CvY

Cary Elwes: One day his agent calls him and says "Hey Michael, I have a script for you."
And Michael said, "Oh yeah, what's it about?"
And the agent says, "Well it's about a million dollars."
And Michael went, "Right, I'll do it!"

Obviously, Sir Caine has now moved that number up to account for inflation.

Bale in The Dark Knight Rises.

“Get with the program!” scolds another letter from a brainwashed fan of the Batman-as-seen-through-the-pretentiousness-of-the-Christopher-Nolan trilogy, “You are a dinosaur!” He’s probably right, and I probably would—if I could only make one lick of sense out of what this nonsense is all about. Silly pop-culture comic book cinema about grown men in rubber masks and Styrofoam jock straps is bad enough, but incomprehensible gibberish to boot is just plain unacceptable. Halfheartedly, I give The Dark Knight Rises—the third and final Batflick in the Nolan trilogy—one star for eardrum-busting sound effects and glaucoma-inducing computerized images in blinding Imax, but talk about stretching things. That’s all most immature audiences require for their hard-earned money these days. The rest of it should not be reviewed by anyone over the age of 12.

As caped crusaders go, I prefer Superman, Spider Man and, above all, Captain Marvel, who has been criminally ignored by the movies so far. (Can’t you just see Michael Fassbender staring into the camera hissing “Shazam!”?) And as Batman goes, I had a lot more fun when he was fighting off Catwoman and The Joker at the Saturday afternoon double features of my youth in his campy bat cave with his jailbait roommate Robin. Drat! Christopher Nolan sent Bruce Wayne to a shrink and Batman lost his mojo. I like one caption writer’s description of the Batman epics as “car porn for geeks and gearheads.” But that doesn’t make The Dark Knight Rises any better. Trash is trash, but when it costs an estimated $250 million (bat food compared to The Amazing Spider-Man’s $137 million), the charges turn criminal and someone should subject the garbage man to a citizen’s arrest.

Like all previous flicks directed by Christopher Nolan and written by his brother Jonathan, this one defies logic and reeks of repulsive, bloated self-importance (not to be confused with anything resembling narrative) and the arrogant conviction that no matter how slick, obtuse, confounding or incompetent it gets, the fanboys will slobber approval. Only a fool would tackle a synopsis, but briefly: We open eight years after Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) vanished in disgrace, recovering from wounds inflicted by The Joker (Heath Ledger) and taking the fall for the death of phony hero and secretly corrupt D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckart). Haunted by the pain and tragedy of past losses and living in seclusion under Gotham City, the 73-year-old superhero—having first risen under the tutelage of Bob Kane in 1939—is lured back into the daylight by neo-noir villains like sexy cat burglar Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) and a monstrous drug-fueled terrorist with a mumblecore voice named Bane (British muscle McGurk Tom Hardy), who commands an army of killers living in the sewers with a face covered by a gas mask (he speaks through a wind tunnel); old friends like police commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), corporate officer Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) and Bruce’s longtime butler Alfred (Michael Caine); and new allies like idealistic cop John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the cunning, enigmatic billionaire socialite philanthropist Miranda Tate (Marion Cotillard), who joins the board of Bruce Wayne Enterprises to save the empire from going under and turns out to be too good to be true. The coherence ends there. Sick and bent over—his X-rays have him looking like matchsticks—Batman comes out of retirement to the musical accompaniment of Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte,” digs the Batmobile out of mothballs and hobbles off to bring the world back into balance, starting with the Stock Exchange. The rest of the movie, which runs just under three hours, is an interminable barrage of exploding football fields, flying cars, computer-generated images of crumbling skyscrapers and bridges and raging mobs fleeing the nuclear destruction of Gotham City. When all else fails, Bane threatens to destroy the human race in 23 days with one brash act, and Bruce ends up flat on his back, in more ways than one.

Christian Bale mumbles and whispers through an echo chamber, changing his appearance and his voice for reasons known only to Mr. Nolan. Michael Caine chews holes through his dialogue with a peat-bog Cockney accent so thick you can’t understand what he’s talking about anyway. You can hoke it all up with crushing violence, but that doesn’t make it pleasurable. Amid an endlessly contrived pile of red herrings, Marian Cotillard’s character seems like something they went back and invented in post-production, while Anne Hathaway, who turns out to be Batwoman in mufti, comes off as a cold, karate-chopping zombie with cleavage. There are so many plot twists I stopped counting. The Nolan brothers seem to be making it up as they go along. Not one character is developed beyond a flat, one-dimensional cardboard paper-doll construct without heart and soul, not to mention flesh and blood. Not one of these distractions invades the plot for any purpose except to extend the running time. Speaking lines they cannot possibly understand, not one actor makes any attempt to be believable. So manufactured and synthetic that they eventually lose all sense of reality, they’re like reconstituted orange juice and processed cheese. If The Dark Knight Rises is finally the funeral of Batman forever (promises, promises!), trendy technology once again triumphs over artistry, professionalism, taste and good clean fun.

Turning a mosh pit of mystical comic book gimmicks into a money pit of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Christopher Nolan gives new meaning to both DUI and DWI—“Directing Under the Influence” and “Directing While Intoxicated”—while raking in millions. I’ll have what he’s having.

rreed@observer.com

THE DARK KNIGHT RISES

Running Time 164 minutes

Written by Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer (story)

Directed by Christopher Nolan

Starring Christian Bale, Michael Caine and Gary Oldman

1/4

Following in the worn avenger footprints of early gut-riddled Clint Eastwood crime melodramas, Charles Bronson in Death Wish and even Jodie Foster in The Brave One, Mr. Caine plays the title role—an elderly pensioner who lives in a crumbling old London housing project minding his own business, dividing his time between hospital visits to see his ailing wife and chess games at the pub with his only friend, a fellow veteran named Leonard. Life is uneventful until his wife dies and Leonard falls prey to the warring drug gangs that hang out in a nearby underpass, shooting heroin and harassing seniors. They leave excrement in mail boxes, spit on defenseless invalids and kill women and children just for sport. Distraught when the police offer no solution and enraged when they release the thugs who stabbed Leonard, Harry takes the law into his own hands. This is one old geezer whom it’s better not to mess with. Like Clint Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, Harry also happens to be an ex-Marine—no stranger to guns and knives, he spent years battling the IRA in Ulster. When this rheumy-eyed, stumbling old war veteran goes on a rampage, look out. Or, better still, look the other way. This is not Noël Coward’s London, but a bleak toilet hole overrun with youthful zombies, snarling at authority and collecting lethal weapons in the way some kids collect video games.

The cops (Ian Glen and a miscast Emily Mortimer, giving her first dull screen performance) are either helpless, complacent or smug. So Harry goes underground to buy an automatic, into a dark subterranean midnight world of predatory human vermin so vile they seem to have been dreamed up by Hieronymus Bosch. Bones shatter, heads are blown away and the population trembles. The film goes to great lengths to make Harry a hero (“He’s doing us a favor,” says the police inspector), and it ultimately becomes a celebration of a vigilante aesthetic. Praise the octogenarian mavericks, it preaches. They’re our only salvation.

It makes for a repellent but not uninteresting panorama of bloody carnage in which Harry, with pistols blazing, rids society of the rats and snakes before they multiply. But encouraging criminal chaos seems morally dubious to me. When the police finally try to crack down, the underworld retaliates, burning down the neighborhood, driving everyone in uniform away in terror and intimidation, and the movie turns surreal. Freshman director Daniel Barber and writer Gary Young insist everything is true—that today’s England is, in fact, worse than anything shown here. But Harry Brown is so deliberately sick and twisted that many scenes fail the credibility test and pessimism reigns throughout. It must be said that even when it moves from social realism to grotesque sensationalism, the film makes the most of a great actor’s resources. Mr. Caine is impeccable in a fastidious performance of contrast and compassion—lonely and subdued at first, ashen-faced with his world in ruins; then hot as a branding iron in the flush of revenge. The ugly stuff in this movie is so over the top that sometimes you are forced to stifle a laugh, but the star always comes through. So good that he even makes you feel sorry for him, he is the driving force that keeps an otherwise despicable movie alive, and saves the audience from hysterics.

rreed@observer.com

Running time: 97 minutes
Written by: Gary Young
Directed by: Daniel Barber
Starring:  Michael Caine, Emily Mortimer, Ian Glen

2 Eyeballs out of 4

After achieving senior citizen status, when the apple won’t bite and the roles dry up, the great old stars are reduced to playing eccentric curmudgeons, terminally ill patients living out their dying days in hospital wards or randy, twinkle-eyed Alzheimer’s patients in nursing homes. This is especially true in the U.K. Peter O’Toole, Judi Dench, Julie Christie and Vanessa Redgrave have already been there. Now, in a sluggish little waste of time and talent called Is Anybody There?, it’s Michael Caine’s turn. In real life, his radiant smile, cockney agility and wicked sense of humor are undiminished. What a downer to see him reduced to a senile hobble on the screen. It’s not a business in which a lively septuagenarian is allowed to grow old gracefully.

Is Anybody There? is one of those self-conscious British country soaps fraught with snowy-haired stereotypes spouting platitudes masquerading as truisms—this time observed by a naïve 8-year-old boy whose parents are forced to turn their rambling home in a seaside town on the English coast into a sour-smelling hospice for the sick and elderly. Reluctantly watching his own childhood abode turned into an institution called Lark Hall, filled with strange noises, boiled foods, body fluids and ghouls from the funeral parlor carrying out dead inmates, Edward (played with guileless curiosity by Bill Milner, who made a profound impression in Son of Rambow) becomes withdrawn and lonely. He is haunted by the mystery of death and obsessed with ghosts, the paranormal and the question of what happens in the hereafter, but he is surrounded by old people who pay no attention to him and want to be left alone. So Edward passes the time at Lark Hall eavesdropping, secretly searching for clues to mortality. What he sees is the misery of his mother, working herself ragged, and his father, whom he overhears declaring love and lust for the 18-year-old maid.

Everything changes with the arrival of a scruffy, jaded, irascible new patient named Clarence (Michael Caine, looking like Father Christmas on Skid Row). Discarded by society and dependant on scanty government handouts, Clarence is a bitter, burned-out old man once known as a magician called “the Amazing Clarence.” Still mourning the passing of his beautiful wife, no longer able to find anything positive in anyone or anything and in a constant rage over his predicament, Clarence hates children and is barely able to tolerate Edward’s presence. But as feel-good movies go, for reasons completely unconvincing to all but the filmmakers, the unlikely friendship between the precocious little lad and the scurrilous old salt rehabilitates Mom and Dad (funny what a little lipstick can do to save a marriage), teaches Edward to relate to kids his own age and convinces the Amazing Clarence to dust off his old guillotine trick for the entertainment of the other patients, tragically chopping off another lodger’s finger in the process. At the risk of sounding churlish, I have to admit the alleged charm of this comic misadventure eluded me totally. In fairness, Is Anybody There?, like all British films, boasts a splendid cast of character actors, including Anne-Marie Duff, Leslie Phillips and the sadly wasted, still-radiant Rosemary Harris. They’re all fine. Mr. Caine seems to have a jolly time doing card tricks, but he’s still a long way off from the rocking chair. Now, as the old song goes, it’s time, sir, to give us “something to remember you by.”

rreed@observer.com

“I convinced my wife I’m dying,” he bragged.

In the film, the 76-year-old British star of stage and screen plays an aging magician who is slowly nearing his death. Yet, he assured the Daily Transom that the movie wasn’t entirely gloomy. “It’s a very funny film,” Mr. Caine said with a smile.

Afterward, the heralded actor joined director John Crowley and a star-studded guest list for an after-party in posh Plaza Hotel’s famous Oak Room.

Several winsome young starlets in attendance were undaunted by the film’s dark themes. “We all age, so it’s inevitable,” said the dainty 20-year-old 30 Rock actress Katrina Bowden. “I don’t dread it.”

“I’ve always been kind of upset that in this country as a whole, our culture kind of focuses on the beauty of youth,” added 22-year-old Dreama Walker of the perennially youthful Gossip Girl. Ms. Walker said she looks forward to being old and eccentric: “I think it’s going to be awesome.”

The balding men in the room begged to differ.

“I fucking hate it,” said 56-year-old filmmaker Paul Haggis. Mr. Haggis left the romanticizing to the younger generation. “You do that when you’re 23,” he said. “In your 50s, it’s really fucking horrible.”

The Daily Transom pushed Mr. Haggis to elaborate. “Why? Because you’re closer to death, aren’t you, for chrissakes? It’s not a good thing!”

“Aging, in all honesty, is really threatening,” noted the chrome-domed musician Moby. “One of the good things about being bald is that, to an extent, I look the same as I did 10 years ago. And I guess I’m hoping that will be true 10 years from now. It’s not like I’m going to start going gray, and it’s not like I’m going to start losing my hair.”

To settle this age business, the Daily Transom went straight to the source: Peter Harness, the 33-year-old screenwriter who inspired all this heaviness.

“I think after you reach about 70 or 80, there’s a definite point where you cease to give a fuck,” Mr. Harness said.

So the key is just to get really old? “Well,” he said, “it must be wonderful to not give a shit about getting laid or impressing anybody or doing anything for anybody else.”

My Jonny and I have always relied heavily on the serenity and sensory deprivation of our annual Palm Beach winter vacation to help us repair our post-holiday jangled nerves. This foofy enclave of nothing-much-to-do is the perfect place for two exhausted retail hags. But now Uncle Bernie has succeeded in transforming our peaceful, pleasantly boring retreat into a veritable Falluja of writhing agony, pawnbroker tickets, regret, nouveau poverty and WASP-y schadenfreude.

Momentous questions hang in the air like the flocks of buzzards that whirl over the stinky intercoastal waters. Are the gentiles sympathetic or are they gloating? Why did malevolent Madoff target his own mishpocheh, the nice Jews of the Palm Beach Country Club? And the charities? Why the Jew-on-Jew crime?  Why not focus his dastardly schemes on the supercilious WASPs over at the snooty Bath and Tennis Club or the Everglades Club?

The tension in PB is palpable. Everywhere you go you hear people saying things like, “Two o’clock. The old broad with the blond wig. One hundred and eighty million.” The town that brought you the effervescent fashions of Lilly Pulitzer is looking positively funereal.

One bright spot: Mod queen Lisa Perry has opened a groovy swinging boutique off Worth Avenue—a microcosm of the ones she has in Soho and Sag Harbor—purveying her futuristic 1960s go-go aesthetic. The relentlessly upbeat vision of La Perry seems right for the times. I can guarantee you that the can-do gal in the graphic fuchsia Perry shift and the Lucite kitten heels will fare better in 2009 than the disheveled neo-hippie of the last few seasons. Simply put: When the axe falls at your place of employ this month, you will be less likely to get a pink slip if you are wearing one of La Perry’s optimistic creations.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I am hoping Lisa will make resort attire for men. I am starting to think I need a new look for my Florida sojourns. Currently, I sport furiously patterned Vilebrequin swim trunks randomly teamed with wildly patterned Liberty shirts. This über-resorty ensemble is topped off with a Jimmy Buffett–esque straw hat that I purchased at the pro shop at Bernie’s old stomping ground, the Palm Beach Country Club.

Not everyone is as fond of my playful prints and lurid colors as I am. On a day trip to Miami at New Year’s, my vibrant combinations were subjected to the ultimate litmus test: I ran into Calvin Klein, the king of fashion minimalism. Looking stupendously fit and handsome, Mr. Klein gave me the once-over and winced as if encountering a Duane Hanson sculpture come to life. While greeting us in a friendly manner, he was visibly shaken by my lack of solids. “What a shonda!” his expression seemed to say.

Our Lincoln Road promenade turned into an orgy of celeb spotting. We saw Michael Caine looking nautical and spiffy in a navy and white Ralph Lauren–ish ensemble. Restraining myself from shouting “Splice the mainbrace!” or “Avast behind!” was far from easy.

“Look, there’s Heather Mills!” I shrieked, upon spotting the former Mrs. Paul McCartney, liberally sprinkling salt all over her linguine at Quattro. “Only one ankle will swell,” I mused to my Jonny, “but that’s still one swollen ankle too many!” I was about to caution her when she got up and strode in our direction, revealing herself not to be La Mills, but just a look-alike blonde with ironed hair.

Just another case of celebrity misidentification! Little did I know, as I chuckled inside my jaunty prints, that the same thing was about to happen to me, albeit on a more F-list level.

“Mimi! Mimi!” screamed two children, and began chasing me in the direction of the beach. In a flash, our leisurely stroll morphed into a Suddenly, Last Summer/Lord of the Flies kind of scenario, starring me as Sebastian Venable/Piggy. Cornered at the entrance to the frozen yogurt shop, I turned to confront my tormentors.

“You’re not our Mimi!” screamed one petulant child reproachfully. Just in the nick of time, the real Mimi, wearing jauntily patterned separates and a large straw hat, materialized to scoop up her charges.

For those of you who have been living on Mars, “Mimi” is the new “grandma.” The words “granny” or “grandma” have lost their original meaning and become adjectives used solely by acid-tongued queens on make-over shows to identify styles that are antiquated, frowzy and not hot.

Seated at the airport for our return flight amongst a gaggle of Botoxed and bleached Mimis, I mused upon this etymological evolution and realized that I am anti-Mimi. I infinitely prefer the hilarious perversity of hearing little kids yelling, “Hey, Grandma!” at a surgically enhanced blonde of indeterminate age in a pink velour Juicy Couture ensemble.

Meanwhile, a fervent wish for 2009: Bernie in stripes!

sdoonan@observer.com

Some folks take metaphysical pleasure from the New Batman Philosophy According to Christopher Nolan: that good and evil lurk side by side in everyone, including Batman. But in my opinion, every Batman movie is about only one thing: action hero (the caped crusader with wings) vs. bad guys (everyone else). Writer-director Nolan’s Batman Begins, with its surreal and mystical mumbo jumbo about playboy Bruce Wayne’s beginnings, remains the worst Batman movie I’ve ever seen, although the comic-book addicts disagree. The Dark Knight takes up where it left off, but if it’s a follow-up that introduces a comprehensive sociopath called the Joker, then how do you explain the fact that the Joker made his debut years ago as Jack Nicholson? It’s just one of the things that makes no sense, but hey-ho, since when did Batman and logic morph?

The Dark Knight is preposterous, unnecessary and a far, far cry from the old DC Comics of my youth created by Bob Kane. But before the hate mail pours in, let me confess I’m a fool for this stuff, and if “logic” is a word you cannot apply to this movie, neither is “boring.” Compared with the summer’s other action potboilers, it’s a Coney Island roller coaster ride with some of the rails missing. It begins with a bank robbery that ends with most of the villains dead and the bravest bank officer with a hand grenade in his mouth attached to a school bus. When the bus pulls away … well, zing goes the strings of his heart. This is the work of the Joker, an archfiend who suffers from rabies of the soul—and cherry-picks his victims at will from the populace of Gotham. While Batman (Christian Bale is back—stronger, hunkier and braver than ever) tries to destroy organized crime in Gotham City, the Joker targets a living hell for the police lieutenant (Gary Oldman), cyberspace wizard Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman), the new D.A. (Aaron Eckhart), his pretty assistant (Maggie Gyllenhaal), who is the object of affection of both the D.A. and Batman, and last—but not least—Batman himself! What follows is two and a half hours of plunder-and-rescue missions where everyone plunders, and there’s always somebody new to rescue. Oddly, it’s the Joker’s movie all the way, and even with his Emmett Kelly whiteface and lipstick-smeared permanent smile slashed jaw to jaw by a razor blade, you know it’s Heath Ledger, hamming it up outrageously in his last film role. He chews a lot of scenery and swallows a lot of asbestos.

I liked it better when playboy Bruce Wayne lived in a dark, underground cave (with or without Robin). Now he’s in a penthouse with sunshine pouring through glass walls and breakfast served in bed by Michael Caine. Add sonar cell phones that blow up entire buildings, a Batman costume that is more than a rack item from the studio wardrobe department (now he actually sprouts bat wings and flies, like Bela Lugosi), more explosives sewn inside a human stomach, helicopters, SWAT teams, and three million citizens held hostage with the entire city set to blow up at the stroke of midnight while the Joker holds the detonator—and you know why Gotham City thinks Batman has crossed over to the dark side.

So let’s get back to Heath Ledger. The Joker is the worst kind of maniac (and the best kind to play) because he craves crime, punishment, anguish and brutality for its own sake, and with no name, no DNA, no labels in his clothes, no dental records, no computer matches, and no F.B.I. files, he can’t be caught. Mr. Ledger plays him like he’s aiming for the Oscar he lost for Brokeback Mountain, with a flat accent unlike any he’s used before, twisting his mouth in a wormy wiggle, licking the inside of his lower lip, doing lewd and lascivious things with his lickety-split tongue like a mental patient. He’s scary and crazy and sometimes very funny, especially in a red Bozo wig and a female nurse’s uniform. When he describes coming face to face with Batman as “what happens when an indestructible force meets an old immovable object,” I laughed aloud. Was I the only one who knew he was quoting the Johnny Mercer lyrics to “Something’s Gotta Give,” sung by Fred Astaire in Daddy Long Legs? The Joker is indestructible. Batman is incorruptible. And The Dark Knight is insurmountable fun.

rreed@observer.com

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, is, of course, ultimately from a series of comic books published by DC Comics, with the creation of the Batman character attributed to Bob Kane. In the world of comic-book superheroes, the Batman franchise has specialized in the most eccentrically colorful villains. I still remember Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman character looking out of the corner of his eye at Jack Nicholson’s clownish antics as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the second such cinematic transfer after Laslia Martinson’s 1966 Batman, with Adam West reprising in a campy fashion his hit television role. I remember also Milton Berle’s smirking at the idea of Batman’s “Ward,” Robin (played by Burt Ward), by pursing his lips as he pronounced “Ward.” The comically homophobic Berle also had fun with the name “Bruce.” Anyway, Robin is nowhere to be found in this new ultra-adult version running some 152 minutes and aptly titled The Dark Knight. Indeed, Mr. Nolan’s is a darker and more nihilistic Batman than any of the other six previous forays into the illuminated night sky of Gotham City, with such other Bruce Wayne/Batman impersonators, besides Mr. West and Mr. Keaton, as Val Kilmer, George Clooney and, in Mr. Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins (2005), Christian Bale. Mr. Bale continues in The Dark Knight along with such other cast members from Batman Begins as Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Michael Caine as Batman’s major-domo and father figure, Alfred; and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s business adviser and facilitator.

As it happens, there are three additions to the cast that lift the film into the artistic stratosphere. First and foremost is the late Heath Ledger as the Joker; he transfigures this traditionally villainous role with a ghostly grandeur that has already impelled some journalists to look up the short roster of posthumous Oscar winners, though in this instance it should be for a lead role rather than a supporting one. Almost as impressive are Aaron Eckhart as the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes, Dent’s legal assistant, who’s torn emotionally between her employer and Bruce Wayne/Batman, with whom she has had a long-term relationship.

What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.

The extraordinary charisma of the three new arrivals has managed to dim the luster of Batman himself. It is not Mr. Bale’s fault that the director has chosen to downplay the sacredly secret duality of Wayne/Batman; previously a deity, here he tends to be treated as just another guy hanging around police stations and gangster joints. Mr. Nolan even shifts the action briefly to Hong Kong to add Asian flavor the proceedings, perhaps because China has become so obtrusively involved in our affairs and our so-called way of life.

For that matter, Ledger’s Joker takes on the dimension of every terrorist in our most fearful imagination. He is something of a genius with high explosives and their electronic detonators. He always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities, and, on occasion, even Batman himself. By the time he has completely terrorized the people of Gotham City by blowing up half the metropolis, and ingeniously engineering the assassination of its mayor, the people are fleeing on ferries because the bridges and tunnels are too vulnerable to the Joker’s limitless terror stratagems. Ironically, Ledger’s Joker kills more mobsters than all the city’s police forces. But it’s not their loot he is after, but simply an acknowledgment by Batman and the district attorney that the battles of good vs. evil are simply exercises in futility. Finally, Batman’s greatest fear is that the Joker will completely succeed in corrupting the citizens of Gotham City, and by the time the film is over, one is not quite sure if good has really triumphed over evil. What is certain, however, is that the struggle will continue well into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

The copious production notes for the film tell us: “Six sequences of The Dark Knight were filmed with IMAX cameras, including the opening six minutes. This marks the first time ever that a major feature film has been even partially shot using IMAX cameras, marking a revolutionary integration of the two film formats. The IMAX Experience will appear in IMAX DMR (letterbox) while scenes shot with IMAX cameras on 15/70mm film will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen, which can be up to eight stories tall, for an all-encompassing moviegoing experience.”

I must confess that I did not see The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen as I was promised by the distributor. It seems that Kung Fu Panda had a prior claim to the IMAX screen. No matter; I have survived such “revolutionary” advances as 3-D, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and who can remember what else? All I can say is that in my humbly Luddite opinion, The Dark Knight doesn’t have to go eight stories high to impress me with its technical virtuosity, for which I must thank, in addition to the Nolan brothers, the director of photography, Wally Pfister; the production designer, Nathan Crowley; the editor, Lee Smith; composers Hans Zimmer and Newton Howard; and the costume designer, Lindy Hemming.

HAVING NOW PRAISED The Dark Knight to the skies, and recommended it to everyone this side of Gotham City, I must ask the reader to read no further in my review of this masterpiece because I am about to reveal its darkest secret. (In other words, spoiler alert.) And what is that? Now, don’t peek. It is simply the wanton slaughter of the two most dynamic and most idealistic innocents, Mr. Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Ms. Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes. Their deaths are testaments to the omnipotently anarchic evil of Ledger’s Joker. And for once, Bruce Wayne/Batman, for all his wiles and wizardry, is unable to save either Dent or Rachel, when earlier Batmen could have rescued them with a climatic swoop of their Batmobile, and have thrown in a wedding for the two virtuous lovers besides.

="letter-spacing: -0.1pt">But Mr. Nolan seems to have fallen into a darker mood between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, less than three years later. Has the world changed that much for the worse in the interim? One is hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative, though it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero. Actually, the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly because Mr. Nolan and his collaborators have not gone out of their way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. The political issues in The Dark Knight remain local and municipal, not really global despite the aforementioned excursion to Hong Kong.

Yet at a time when all social systems are veering toward moral bankruptcy, I was struck by the way Gotham City is presented for the first time in Batman movie history as a city with global connections, and not merely as a self-contained abstraction of a city with its own hermetically sealed morality and innocence.

Of the two precedent-shattering victims of the Joker’s anarchic ability to corrupt the most law-abiding citizens into betraying their friends and associates, Rachel is disposed of fairly quickly and without much suffering. Dent’s destruction, by contrast, is excruciatingly prolonged by its being divided into two stages, the first when half of his face is burned up at the very moment when Batman is desperately trying to save his life. Dent then briefly becomes a Batman-genre grotesque nicknamed Two-Face, who goes on a murderous spree directed against the once-trusted individuals who had betrayed him and Rachel. The Joker has thus succeeded in turning the once-crusading-for-justice Dent into everything he had previously hated.

In the end, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Alfred and Lucius Fox try to pick up the pieces of a shattered community, but their hearts don’t seem to be in it. Too many good people have died in a seemingly futile effort to reform their society. Doesn’t that seem too close to the daily world news, even though The Dark Knight is not intentionally trying to establish any real-life parallels with its own gory fictions?

I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan’s work, even though he has been much honored for his stylistic innovations in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006). But after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema.

asarris@observer.com

Flawless is another contrived heist flick, with Michael Caine living up to his confession in a recent interview that he’s lost so much interest in acting that he only makes movies for money now, and Demi Moore as living proof of the dangers of too much Botox. She’s stalled in her career as the first female manager who ever existed in the British diamond industry and is on the verge of being sacked. He’s the embittered old night janitor who needs retirement money. Together they embark on a highly implausible scheme to relieve the diamond vaults of two tons of jewels worth 100 million pounds, hidden in a coffee thermos. She wants revenge. He wants recompense for the years he’s spent on his hands and knees for slave wages. The details of the heist, in which snafus lurk around each marble hallway, bulge with routine bank robbery hokum. The stroke-producing horror the next day, when the corporation finds the world’s largest supply of priceless gems completely vanished beyond security guards and walls of solid steel, and the tedious investigation that follows do not exactly add up to nail-chewing excitement. While all of this happens, for no reason, in the 1960’s, Ms. Moore returns decades later in a white wig and three miles of latex wrinkles to explain what happened to the money. I must have been asleep, but I swear I thought she said she gave it all to charity. Say huh? A publicist for the film was kind enough to let me see the ending twice, and I still could not explain it at gunpoint.

The two stars don’t have enough charisma to fill a demitasse. Ms. Moore looks hard and lacquered and sculpted out of 40 miles of unpaved road, and Mr. Caine can barely keep his eyes open. We now know that when Mitchum acted with his eyes at half-mast, he was crocked. Mr. Caine is just bored. Did director Michael Radford even bother to introduce them before he yelled “Action”? Flawless is anything but.

Dragging Batman addicts back to the beginning of the Bob Kane action heroics published by DC Comics, the producers of this sadistic mess spent enough money to find a cure for AIDS, but they couldn't find a way to keep me awake. Batman Begins is like a corny ride at Disney World, pushing its way through cardboard tunnels with silent passengers, second-rate thrills and no payoff at the end of the trip. Even with an excess of special effects, kung fu, martial arts, car crashes, runaway trains, enough violence to make you retch and enough noise to burst your eardrums, it's still silly and boring-a massive labyrinth of incomprehensible gibberish that left me asking, "Huh?"

This is the fifth of the big-budget Batman flicks (I'm not counting the cheesy TV series with Eartha Kitt as Catwoman and the cheap movie knockoff with Adam West), and they've saved the worst for last. With Christian Bale as the latest camp crusader, this is the one that answers such burning Zeitgeist-curdling questions as: Who is Bruce Wayne? Why does he live in the kind of underground cave usually reserved for bat droppings? Why does he prowl the night, even in a heat wave, wearing a rubber sweatbox with big ears? Why doesn't he have a girlfriend? This movie goes to elaborate means to actually provide a few of the answers we've all been waiting for. Nothing about the relationship between Batman and his adoring young sidekick-cum-roommate-cum-jailbait Robin, although their dark Bat Cave does have only one bedroom and … but I'm getting ahead of myself. One revelation at a time, please.

First, there's little Brucie, traumatized by two childhood setbacks: falling down a cistern into a subterranean cavern populated by thousands of bats, and watching his parents gunned down in the streets of Gotham on a night that changed the course of his life and drove him to seek revenge. Tortured by guilt and rage, Bruce turns his back on his inheritance, runs away from Princeton and roams the world. Years of existential drifting lead him to a sadistic prison in the middle of what looks like Mongolia or Tibet, from which he escapes to the snowy mountains of Bhutan and the hideout of the League of Shadows, a murderous vigilante group headed by Ken ( The Last Samurai) Watanabe. Under the wing of a mysterious mentor named Ducard (Liam Neeson, mumbling the most pretentious mumbo-jumbo since Qui-Gon Jinn), Bruce masters the physical and mental disciplines to fight the evils of the underworld by eating the petals of a rare blue flower that grows out of the ice and has only been previously munched, one presumes, by the Abominable Snowman.

"What are you seeking?" asks Ducard. "To fight injustice," says Bruce. To save others from fear, he must first confront his own, which of course means-egads!-bats! Trust me when I tell you that the first 45 minutes of this movie are devoted to a ludicrous, nonstop philosophical debate about the theory of anger and the principles of justice. (I timed it with a watch.) At the end of 45 minutes, anybody who is still awake will be treated to a wild martial-arts melee in which bones crack in Dolby and Bruce burns everyone to death in an explosion massive enough to annex the Himalayas to mainland China. Then Bruce returns to Gotham to wipe out corruption in a Halloween costume.

After seven years' absence, he takes over his father's empire, but it's not easy fighting the rats and the hoods in their underworld sewers when you're a rich playboy in a Ralph Lauren tux. Without Superman's Kryptonite or Spider-Man's wall-scaling cobwebs, poor Bruce has to find his power in an indestructible symbol-the kind that will scare the crap out of the criminal underworld, land him in the tabloids and attract good P.R. Aha! How about the thing he dreads most? A bat! "To conquer fear, a man must become fear-bask in the fears of other men!" is the talisman he lives by. I know: It doesn't make any sense, but it's the reason for the bat costume. Also the Batmobile and the flexible-fabric Batman cape, designed by Morgan Freeman, and the glistening Batcave, fluffed up by his long-term butler, valet and family retainer Alfred (Michael Caine, slumming and sardonic, but the money was good).

From preppie nebbish to crusading masked vigilante, it's good to see Christian Bale looking healthy again. After destroying his body to lose 63 pounds for the role of the emaciated human cadaver in The Machinist, he's wisely back on ice cream and mashed potatoes again. The second half of the movie is recycled comic-book splat-pow-zowie, with Batman and the good guys (Caine, Freeman and Gary Oldman as Gotham's only honest cop) declaring war on the villains (notorious drug lord Tom Wilkinson, corporate thief Rutger Hauer and evil insane-asylum doctor Cillian Murphy), who are smuggling toxins into the city to poison the water supply. Toxins (are you ready?) from the weird blue flowers back in Bhutan! There is a girl: Katie Holmes, too young for the part and hopelessly miscast as an assistant district attorney. She's around for window dressing. She says things like "It's not what you are underneath-it's what you do that defines you." No wonder Bruce is waiting for Robin.

Batman Begins is for morons. There isn't one sincere or convincing moment in it, and even the stunts are too boring to sustain interest. It's a miracle that any of the actors can speak their lines with the remotest iota of conviction, and most of the time it's obvious that the big talents like Neeson, Caine, Freeman, Oldman and Wilkinson are not even trying. I liked the design of Gotham-a mechanized jungle of steel girders and elevated trains, where it is always midnight-but none of the other elements that made the previous Batman movies so entertaining are present here. The film has no interesting villains. No Catwoman, no Mr. Freeze, no Penguin, no Poison Ivy, no Batgirl. The plot is all over the place. The numbing script and lame direction, both by Christopher Nolan, who made the overrated, mind-bending Memento, smacks of desperation. There's not one train crash, but two. Not one Batmobile chase, but many. The movie seems to be running the same footage over and over again. The plotting is careless and lacks coherence. Mr. Bale's unremarkable performance as the masked creature of the night is a lot of empty swaggering.

And where do they go from here? At the end, somebody presents Batman with a photograph of Gotham's next big colorful and devious hoodlum: the Joker! But we've already been there, done that. With any luck, Batman Begins is also Batman Ends.

The Enchanter

Mr. Bale is seen to better advantage in Howl's Moving Castle, in which he isn't seen at all. In this animated children's fantasy by Japanese icon Hayao Miyazaki, he is heard as the voice of Howl, a handsome, manly and quite beleaguered Mitteleuropa wizard who travels from town to town in a magical house with gigantic chicken legs that looks like a cross between the Mill on the Floss and the Toonerville Trolley.

Into this flying junkyard comes the heroine of the story, a warm-hearted, appealing but sadly plain-faced 18-year-old hat maker named Sophie (Emily Mortimer), who has been turned into an old crone by the disagreeable Witch of the Waste (a hilarious turn by that most revered of all Gravel Gerties, Lauren Bacall). Searching for the magic potion that will reverse the spell, the romantic Sophie, trapped in the body of an arthritic, ratchety-voiced old Grandma (the legendary Jean Simmons, with a vocal bass fiddle of a rumble that stops the show), joins Howl's moving castle as a cleaning woman and proceeds to change the lives of the inhabitants, each of whom is under a different kind of spell.

They include Markl, the wizard's apprentice (Josh Hutcherson), and Calcifer (Billy Crystal), the fire flame that gives the house its energy, heat and personality, as well as the once-glamorous witch, who has melted into a blob of oozing double chins and varicose veins. One by one, Grandma transforms all of their lives, including her own, while they wait for a miracle from the powerful Madame Suliman (Blythe Danner), the sorceress who has caused all of the problems in the first place. But it's not the plot that will stoke imaginations of every age. It's the depth and dimension of the imagery-beautiful landscapes in a setting that looks like a cross between Berchtesgaden and Vermont, a silent scarecrow named Turnip Head, armies of soldiers marching to war, battlefields and markets and town squares teeming with people, airplanes and explosions and violence and romantic entanglements that make you laugh and sigh and applaud the beauty and scope of Mr. Miyazaki's unique, all-encompassing and completely original visions.

The whole thing has the heavenly whimsy of Ludwig Bemelmans' illustrations from the classic French children's books. The result is 118 minutes of rapturous enchantment. None of this magic can be properly described in a way that can fully serve its unforgettable flavor. Sublime and splendiferous, there has simply never been anything like the sophisticated animation of Hayao Miyazaki. All I can say is that if you think you're too old or too jaded for the ingenuity and wonder of Howl's Moving Castle, you better check to see if your heart is still beating.

Puzzle People

For discerning viewers with attention-deficit disorders and challenged tailbones who like their plots juicy and their movies short, Heights is just what the chiropractor ordered. Sensitively written by Amy Fox and carefully directed by Chris Terrio, both making sound, intelligent feature-film debuts, and produced by the late, lamented Ismail Merchant, Heights is one of those layered ensemble pieces that tells several different stories simultaneously, fatefully connecting the lives of a disparate group of conflicted people with surprising twists of irony in the Robert Altman tradition. Like Short Cuts or Magnolia-or the recent Crash-it has a cantilevered effect, like an architectural curiosity in which the levels balance each other with hanging beams that seem to appear from nowhere.

During one hot 24 hours of a steamy Manhattan summer, Diana Lee (Glenn Close), a celebrated and neurotic Broadway star, is rehearsing for a revisionist production of Macbeth in which the three witches are modeled after Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney and Martha Stewart. While she agonizes over the lack of onstage passion in her director (Eric Bogosian), her husband is creating some backstage passion of his own with another woman. Her daughter Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), a beautiful photographer, is shivering with fear and doubt over her forthcoming wedding to her dreamboat roommate, Jonathan (camera-ready pretty boy James Marsden), a promising young lawyer tortured by a dark secret he can't even tell his rabbi (George Segal). Isabel's predicament is exacerbated by her old boyfriend Mark (Matt Davis), who offers her a great assignment for the ultra-boring New York Times Magazine section.

The tension mounts when Peter (John Light), a handsome reporter for Vanity Fair, arrives from London to write a piece about Benjamin Stone, a famously gay British celebrity photographer with a notorious history as a homosexual Casanova, and mysteriously telephones Jonathan incessantly for an interview. Meanwhile, at the theater, Diana takes a fancy to Alec (Jesse Bradford), a struggling actor with soulful eyes and sensuous lips-who, as fate would have it, lives in the same apartment building as Isabel and Jonathan.

Maneuvering their way through the broken asphalt of New York life and trying not to step on the cracks, all of these people are obviously heading for a collision. The intersection at which they meet is a party that night at Diana's loft on Bethune Street. When the London writer shows Diana some of the scandalous Benjamin Stone male nudes shot by the subject of his article, one of them is her future son-in-law! While the draconian Diana rushes through the night with the bad news to save her daughter from a fate worse than bad reviews, Isabel climbs to the roof and finds her fiancé in the arms of their neighbor, Alec-the same young actor who auditioned earlier in the day for her mother, and then … but enough! There is so much more to discover for yourself as the film explores loneliness, inequity, desire and self-denial, and the human pieces of an eloquent jigsaw puzzle find self-discovery, redemption, optimism and truth. The film is never dull, the writing and direction are impeccable, the ensemble performances are uniformly seamless, and Heights is brave, eloquent and riveting. One of the summer's most serendipitous surprises.