The Dark Knight ****

"Either you die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

- Harvey Dent

This film stands out among superhero films for one reason - it asks the question, "what is a hero?" It has all the fight scenes, chases and gadgets you would expect in a superhero, specifically Batman, movie, but unlike most of these films, it goes in deep beneath the surface of action movie superficiality.

The Dark Knight is far from a perfect film. It has errors, plot holes, and technical annoyances throughout. One such plot hole occurs after Batman rescues Rachel from his penthouse apartment after his party is hijacked by the Joker. (This is not a spoiler as it was reveled in the trailer) After we see that Rachel has been rescued from plummeting to her death, we cut to the next scene. Presumably, Bruce Wayne believed that his guests would be able to fend off the Joker and company by themselves. It gets worse. When Harvey Dent recommends that Rachel go to the safest place in the city, she decides to go back to the Wayne penthouse. After all, it was only broken into by the Joker the night before. The same confusing, breakneck action choreography persists from Batman Begins, as does the lightning pacing that could potentially keep a step ahead of some viewers. Gordon, played by Gary Oldman, mumbles through many of his otherwise excellent lines, while Batman, played by Christian Bale, deliberately overplays his ultra-growly Bat-voice.

Even though this film has many errors, it is a significant improvement on Batman Begins.The returning principal actors are all excellent in this film, so I will focus on the new guys. Heath Ledger's performance (?) as the Joker is the best in the film. What you see in the trailer is a demented freak of a villian, and that is what he is in the film, but what you do not see is that he is a character of geniune humor and is the one who gets the most laughs. Aaron Eckhart also joins, and meshes perfectly with the existing cast. The character arc of his Harvey Dent lends the film a real sense of tragedy as he falls from being the hero to being the villian.

While The Dark Knight is a genuine comic book movie, with fights, gadgets, and witty repartee (especially between Bruce and his butler Alfred (Michael Caine), it has much deeper themes beneath the surface, the central theme being heroism. The film asks this question of Batman during his desperate fight against the Joker, and the answer is that he is farther from the definition of a hero and much closer to something else. Batman is a knight, and a dark one at that.

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Speed Racer (2008) ***

"It doesn't matter if racing never changes. What matters is if we let racing change us."

- Racer X

It's hard to give Speed Racer a fair review. Part of me wants to condemn its choppy manner and frequent inexplicable weirdness. But part of me wants to embrace the bright colors, exciting race scenes, and yes, its strong messages about competition, family, and evil big corporations.

Having seen and enjoyed a few original Speed Racer cartoons, I feel that I am a bit more qualified to review this film than your average critic. As a fan, the first half hour, especially the first race scene was incredibly thrilling. But then the family sat down to have a pancake breakfast. And we watch them eat for a while. And then the evil big corporation president comes over. And we watch him eat. Don't get me wrong, the Wachowski brothers can shoot an awesome car race sequence, and they can turn out a watchable breakfast scene, and they can inject their unique imagination into both, but they cannot make them flow together well in the same movie. The action scenes and the family scenes seem to be two separate movies that take place in the same world and have the same actors, but have entirely different paces. It seems that the movie can go from its most frenetic to its most placid in a matter of minutes, throwing it into park rather than coming to a smooth stop.

The movie is well casted with a few standouts. John Goodman (Sully in Monster's Inc.) plays an excellent Pops, who is the focal point of racing as well as family for Speed. Matthew Fox (Jack Shepard from Lost) was the best casting decsion in the movie. His note-perfect and ruthless character is also the most complex in the Speed Racer universe, as he is deeply tormented by...oh, wait, i'm not going to spoil that for you.

Speed Racer is an effective tribute to the cartoon. The campy names, cool car designs, and family values are lifted directly from the show. The animation techniques in the original show were revolutionary (in the T.V. world), so it is just as well that this movie should use cutting edge effects as well. I wish, however, that the dialogue, as rediculous as much of it was, could have been more inspired by the cartoon (and perhaps they could have shortened the talking scenes by talking faster). Another thing conspicously absent: Speed's trademark exclamation, "OHHHHHHHHHHH!"The look of this movie could only have been created by a cartoon and caffeine fueled imagination. Everything is swathed in bright colors. Very bright colors. Surely the inventors of color film never imagined that their invention would be (ab)used this much. Even painted in normal colors, the outlandish universe of Speed Racer would seem utterly strange (note the above comment about imagination). It is a world that could only come into being through the magic of CGI (and some will think that CGI never should have stooped that low).

My take? I love it. Fewer movies have been made that show this much imagination. For many of us, it is a trip back to our childhood of making hotwheels cars do outrageous stunts and building fantastical worlds from Legos. The Wachowskis have let their imagination loose and have made CGI do their Hotwheels stunts and Lego castles in photorealistic technicolor. Some of our retinas just wish that their imagination could have kept the color palette a bit more limited.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) ****

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is more of science fiction and paranoia film than a horror flick. The first act is very much a horror film, successfully creating a aura of suspense, but when we see the phenomenon explained, it becomes a science fiction and thriller movie.

The movie is about a doctor who finds that something very strange is happening to the people in his town. People think that their loved ones are impostors even though there are no discernible differences. All this is compounded by the appearance of mysterious seed pods...

The movie is made in standard horror black and white, but director Don Siegel uses it show both bright cheerful suburbs and noir-ish shadowed alleys. The overuse of dutch angles is blatant, but perhaps neccesary to give this film an edge. The contrasting styles certainly work well to communicate what this film is trying to say.

All good science fiction makes you think, and this movie surely does. It forces to think about humanity and what makes us human. It is also a commentary on the homogeneous suburban life of the 50s and the lack of individual expression (a very human trait).

Seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers? What did you think? Comment!