No Hands: Her Master's Voice

In Christopher Guest’s HBO series Family Tree, the British ventriloquist Nina Conti plays the hero’s sister who began using a hand puppet as a therapeutic tool after experiencing a childhood trauma. She is now an adult who still has a piece of monkey-shaped felt draped over her hand, using it to express her forbidden and transgressive thoughts. If there’s a popular attitude toward ventriloquism that places it at the bottom of the show business barrel, lumping it in with card tricks and pretending to be trapped inside an imaginary box, there’s a corresponding attitude that sees it as a black art disguised as children’s entertainment, a way for timid people to uncork their inner demons. 

Waterlogged: Julie Taymor's The Tempest

Helen Mirren and Felicity Jones in The Tempest

In the Shakespearean canon, The Tempest, reportedly his last written play, stands out as one of his weakest works. It’s essentially a simple tale about Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, who’s been exiled to a deserted island for over a decade with his daughter, Miranda. As The Tempest opens, by use of magic, Prospero has stranded his enemies – who usurped his post – and some others, on various parts of the island. There, they endeavour to make their way back to civilization even as Prospero instructs his child on life and love, and commands the resentful half-man/half-monster Caliban and the loyal sprite Ariel to torment their reluctant guests. It all builds to, not a climax, exactly, but a mild confrontation between the parties concerned, and then a flat and dull happy ending. Slapdash, superficial and thin, The Tempest, even when staged well, as it was at Stratford this past summer (see my review here), cannot surmount its many failings and shortcomings. But when you let a talentless filmmaker like Julie Taymor (Titus, Frida) tackle the project, the results are considerably worse.

Oppenheimer: The Center Does Not Hold

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in Oppenheimer.

Christopher Nolan makes his bid for movie posterity with Oppenheimer. His three-hour biographical epic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, is culled from a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, and transpires over more than three decades (from the mid-1920s through the late 1950s). Many of the roles, both major and ancillary, are taken by familiar, talented actors, and the film, shot by Hoyte Van Hoytema, who has lit all of Nolan’s films since Interstellar, is beautiful to look at. Oppenheimer is a serious effort but not, I have to say, a very good picture, though it contains one section, focusing on Trinity, the first detonation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1945 – the culmination of the research conducted by the Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer’s direction – that belongs in a good picture: it’s taut, gripping and suspenseful.

London Calling: Curtain Up in the UK

Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams, “In a Forest Dark and Deep”

Six plays in nine days proved to be a brilliant means of ignoring royal wedlock during a recent trip to England, while also fulfilling a longtime dream to immerse myself in London theater – or theatre, as the locals prefer. April was sunny in the often rainy city, enhanced by a sudden heatwave that felt more Mediterranean than Thames. But I enjoyed the resulting lush vegetation primarily en route to sit in darkened venues, watching four grim dramas, one partially comedic take on serious global tensions and a single farce.

Bad Faith: The Dark Knight Rises

As fans of superhero pictures (and that’s most of the world, evidently) know, the Batman series divides into three categories. There are the Tim Burtons, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992), with their magnificent, High Romantic Anton Furst designs and Michael Keaton as a brooding, mysterious Bruce Wayne – a portrayal that, in a better world, would have made him an actor to be cherished forever. Burton put a premium on character and let the stories unravel like fairy tales. The Joel Schumacher entries, Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997), were extravagantly (but not wittily) overdesigned; they were like arcades, or gay roller discos, and they underused their stars, Val Kilmer and George Clooney respectively, so that afterwards you couldn't remember anything they’d done.

Then Christopher Nolan took over the franchise in 2005 with Batman Begins, which he also co-wrote with Davis G. Goyer. Nolan brought art-house credentials (Memento, a wildly overrated puzzle picture that didn’t make basic plot sense) and a grim relentlessness that I would have said was precisely the wrong kind of approach for a comic-book adventure. And the concept was misconceived. Bruce (Christian Bale), like the character Michael Keaton played in the Burton pictures, has never been able to move past the pointless deaths of his parents, before his eyes, at the hands of a mugger, but it isn’t grief that motivates this Bruce; it’s guilt. As a boy, Bruce was so terrified of bats as a result of falling down a well on his dad’s estate that, when his parents took him to see the operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat), the prop bats on stage distressed him and he asked to be taken home early. They encountered the mugger on a deserted street outside the opera house; if Bruce had only been able to control his phobia, his parents might be alive today. So when, years later, returning to a Gotham City overrun with gangsters and all manner of corruption, he chooses to disguise himself as a bat, it’s his way of conquering those childhood fears and doing penance for the fact that his inability to handle them led his parents to their deaths. (The real corruption – or at least stupidity of a monumental order – must have been at Warner Brothers, where this plot premise made it past the pitch stage.) But first there’s a long sequence at a Tibetan monastery, which seems to belong in some other movie altogether, where Wayne is trained in martial arts by mystics (the westerner among them is Ra’s Al Ghul, played by Liam Neeson, whose goatee is more expressive than his performance) who turn out to be the League of Shadows, fanatics with a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah God complex, dedicated to wiping out cities overrun with evil, like Gotham. So Bruce has to defeat them – temporarily, at least – and stage an escape before he can return to battle the more homegrown evil in his own hometown.

Bruce Wayne and his murdered parents in Batman Begins 

The chief villain in Batman Begins, though, is the sinister Dr. Jonathan Crane (Cillian Murphy), who, as The Scarecrow, poisons his victims with a psychotropic aerosol that maddens them and projects their worst fears onto his burlap mask. Perhaps I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I consider it a sign of bad faith in a director of a comic-book movie that he thinks nothing of putting his audience through the same misery as the characters entrapped in their cruelest fantasies – like the maggots foisted on a screaming Katie Holmes (as Bruce’s childhood friend Rachel Dawes, now an ADA of impressive moral fiber and courage). By the time Crane had pumped enough aerosol in the streets of Gotham in the climax to send paranoid zombies after Rachel and some unfortunate little boy, I was looking around for something to throw at the screen.