Tag: dark

REVIEW: THE BATMAN

Joann Leave a comment

The Batman, 2022 / Spoiler Alert!

 

If we look at the evolution of superhero movies decades later, I think it will be a pretty interesting anthropology resource. All superheroes symbolize justice but the social norm of justice changes over time. This happened in the new batman as well.

New society, new villains. The villains in this movie do not work on personal, fictional motivation like pride or psycopathy. Instead, in this movie, they are the ones who were harmed systematically. The villain is not lone genius anymore – they are people who urge others to turn to violence with them to break down the society, and the most vicious crisis was aroused when they worked as a group. This resembles the spread of hatred on the internet and violent crimes happening in consequence of those messages. The metaphor to the modern society was quite clear – the riddled even blatantly talked like a  youtube or user of another Social Media platform, thanking the viewers for their support. I was almost expecting a ‘please like and subscribe…’.

The classic hero changed with the society to address the new messages aginst the evil as well. Bruce Wayne, if I remember correctly from prior films, was torn between his identity as a billionaire and the mysterious superhero and the dilemma of the personal judgment of justice was his main worry. For this new Batman, however, whether it’s known who’s under the bat-mask is not such an existential problem. This batman seems to be more careless about it (he got almost unmasked by a curious policeman after he was unconscious due to a bomb explosion) and the Riddler even says that who’s under the mask “does not matter”. If the former batman hides deeper inside himself to solve his doubts, this one comes out. The scene where batman leads the civilian out of the water with the red light and help carry wounded citizens clearly showed that this batman demonstrates a new notion of peace-not one that is magically achieved by a lone superhero, but one that is led by a superhero symbol but that can be achieved together. This batmans stands with the people, and that reminded me of the appeal in the society to unite together to fight the wrong. Batman with the mysteriousness reduced, interacting with the people was a new change. Almost like a friendly neighborhood… No, that’s another guy.

This movie is dark-literally. It had a lot of rain in the scenes and ones that minimal light is used. This led to many visually highly satisfying scenes-my favorite was the one where the screen was all dark and the movement of the characters was illuminated only with the fire from the end of the gun. Also, I saw the rain as more than the weather- with the final crisis being the flood, water could mean the danger to the city, and the rain could represent that the city was in danger. In all, highly recommend this movie. Go check it out!

REVIEW: The Favourite

Laura Dzubay 1 Comment

I don’t know quite what I was expecting when I walked into a screening of The Favourite at The Michigan Theatre. I had heard it described as a dark comedy, while other people had told me definitively that it wasn’t a comedy. I knew it involved queer relationships, but people had also told me not to think of it as a gay love story. Emma Stone was the only actress with whom I was very familiar, and her own past filmography has been so varied that it was hard to predict what type of role she was going to play.

As a result, it’s saying something that even throughout the length of The Favourite, I still struggled to pinpoint exactly what type of a movie it was. This isn’t meant as a slight. The movie is of course a historical drama, set during the reign of Queen Anne in Britain during the early 18th century. The comedic elements, although dry and often subtle, were often at the forefront of the screen, from the petty arguments and witty bickering between Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz, The Lobster) and Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult, Mad Max: Fury Road) to visual jokes, like Robert Harley pushing Abigail Masham (Stone) into a muddy ditch. The romance took a backseat to the drama, to be sure, and The Favourite could not quite be classified as a romance film. However, a major element of the emotional weight of the end of the film was the factor of Queen Anne’s (Olivia Colman) discarding of Sarah, which only landed in the way that it did due to these characters’ romantic history.

The Favourite is a difficult film to characterize, but this lack of definitiveness is done purposefully and well. At its core, The Favourite is about manipulation, which is why it feels fitting that even as the three central characters — primarily Sarah and Abigail — manipulate each other, the film is also manipulating its viewers. It is tempting to side with Abigail for much of the first half of the movie, as she is constantly undercut and underestimated by the other characters. Abigail seems kind and relatable, bringing Anne medicine for her pained legs and shrugging off the advances of Samuel Masham (Joe Alwyn, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk). She is also in competition with Sarah for Anne’s attention, and Sarah, while at times genuinely funny and surprisingly endearing, can also come across as intimidating (especially to a new servant like Abigail), vindictive, and callous.

In the end, though, the film makes a point about the tremendous bearing that wealth and stature can have upon the way that a person acts. When Abigail ultimately succeeds in becoming Anne’s “favourite” and edging Sarah out of the queen’s inner circle, it becomes clear that she was truly the vindictive one all along, motivated by material gain and greed rather than by any real attraction to or interest in Anne. When Sarah is distanced from the queen and then exiled, she comes across as emotionally closer and more attached to Anne than ever before. Anne herself, as the queen, is in a position to take her wealth and status more for granted than the other characters, and therefore exerts the bulk of her emotional energy on her own profound loneliness and despair.

The Favourite ends with an incredibly sad, grave, loneliness-oriented scene, far from the comedic and more lighthearted elements that punctuated the film earlier on. And yet, despite some of the seeming tonal shifts, it feels apparent that this gravity was what characterized the film from the very beginning. On the one end, this movie is about three women possessing varying degrees of power, each able and willing to do various things — some of them outrageous things — in order to gain and maintain this power. On the other hand, it simultaneously perfectly captures the notion of desperation, of seeking all of the material promises of a good life — wealth, power, beautiful objects, political sway — only to be crestfallen upon the realization that these gains have come at the cost of forsaking true and meaningful companionship. Each of the three characters embodies some angle of this concept by the end of the film, completing a trifecta of powerful acting and storytelling. The Favourite is currently playing at local theaters such as the Quality 16 and the Ann Arbor 20 IMAX.