**SPOILER ALERT**

So, this past Monday I decided to listen to what the media and my compatriots were telling me to do and see The Dark Knight Rises. In a bit of a change of format for this here blog, I thought I would take stab at writing an actual movie review. First off let me say that overall I was very pleasantly surprised by this film. I definitely ENJOYED it. I say “surprised” because Batman Begins bored me to TEARS and I didn’t even see the Dark Knight. Plus I thought Inception was steaming pile of shit. So suffice it to say my expectations were a smidge low.

My biggest complaint was simply that there was just TOO MUCH GOING ON. Christopher Nolan, we’re acutely aware that you have 10,000 ideas going on in that head of yours, and we realize that you’re so uber successful that Warner Brothers would probably distribute a film that was 4 hours of you taking a dump at a child’s birthday party, but I think there is a certain level of tact to be considered when executing these ideas. I felt like the hero of the story, Batman, not only was a secondary character, but was totally engulfed in the “action” of the story. Because there was so much solid plot in the movie, and there were so many characters doing their own separate things, I didn’t know who I was supposed to be identifying with and why I was supposed to be so invested. I think the only character I was truly empathetic with was Michael Cane’s Alfred. That man played the shit out of that role! Whenever he would start to get teary I would have to clench my jaw and try not to get all misty with him! He was totally heartbreaking! But Bruce Wayne just seemed way too passive for his own good. The only substantial point of conflict was when he was trapped in that remote prison facility. And even then it was hard to hook onto what he was supposedly overcoming in that scenario. There was the old senile medic giving him advise, there was the other man taking care of him who was guiding him, but what the hell was the message or lesson he was learning there? Maybe there was something highly profound but I completely missed it. The whole thing seemed very thematically disjointed. What I gathered was mostly that he had given up on the society that turned its back on him, and then it was inevitably in jeopardy again, so he overcame that and came to its rescue. No the most nuanced emotional subtext as far as I’m concerned. I wanted to feel like there were some huge stakes that Bruce Wayne was involved and I didn’t get that.

Perhaps one of the reasons why I wasn’t as interested in Batman was because Catwoman kicked so much ass! I was a tough sell with Anne Hathaway: I think she’s annoying and goofy and looks like a freaky porcelain doll that talks and wears ballgowns. But that girl blew me away! From that first scene where she meets Bruce and she totally flips from the young ingenue bit into Catwoman…I was glued! Maybe I kinda sorta missed the Tim Burton/Michele Pfeiffer sexy-ass costume at first, but within 5 minutes I was thinking “Michelle, who?”. What really won me over about Hathaway’s catwoman was that she was clever; she’s a criminal and she’s a thief and she’s all about the bottom line, so she has this “I don’t give a fuck, a girls’ gotta eat” attitude that I thought was hot as hell. And PS it took me a good hour to realize that those “cat ears” she was wearing were really just her goggles that she flipped over her head…nice touch. I think also what’s so compelling about Catwoman is that she is so morally ambiguous and interesting. You have to wonder: “what IS it about that Selina Kyle?”. She’s a mystery. But people love mysteries, right? Plus she flips and does acrobatics and looks hot so there’s that.

However, as a counter to that, I wasn’t really feeling Tom Hardy as Bane. He was probably my least favorite part of the movie. He just wasn’t scary enough for me. Maybe it was just me, but when he was on screen I wasn’t exactly terrified, it was more along the lines of “oh yeah he’s back…he’s probably going to beat someone up again”. And when he finally executes the overthrow of Gotham’s government and frees all the prisoners, I wasn’t even totally sure why. He just wants the world to live in chaos? Or he wants to enforce his own brand of justice? And if so, then why is he even bothering if he’s going to blow the place up anyway? I wasn’t toally buying his whole shtick. Not the mention that with that vocal effect from his mask I couldn’t understand WHAT he saying half the time. And in true Christopher Nolan fashion, he turns out to not even be the real villain! Why does he do this to us!!? He spends so much time setting up one thing, and then pays off something completely different that we didn’t even care about! WHY!? So when that “pivotal” moment comes where we realize that Marion Cotillard is the real villain, Bane just suddenly gets very unceremoniously killed and that’s it. Then she dies a few minutes later. And the problem is, it’s not that this twist totally changes the circumstances of the story, it’s the same thing, the same plan, just with a different person. What’s the point? In The Sixth Sense, for example, that revelation TOTALLY changed what we thought we knew about the story. This did not. If anything it just deflates our interest in Bane. The ending in general is where the whole thing unraveled for me. Instead of everyone coming to an emotional crux, everything just kind of fizzled out and the plot just went exactly the way you thought it would: Catwoman obviously comes back, the bomb is discarded and the city is obviously saved, and then that’s that. It was missing something.

One thing I was impressed with though was the acting: in my observation, Christopher Nolan simply does not know how to properly direct actors. Did you see Inception? Ok, well so did I and I thought Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a smarmy asshole in that movie. He also just bugs me in general: “Oooh, you wear argyle sweaters and play acoustic guitar. We get it, you’re cute. Whatever”. But I thought he was kind of great in this. He embodied that character remarkably well. He obviously had that snarky side to him, but we got his emotional back-story and understood where he was coming from. He was compassionate but still with an edge which I personally totally responded to. My only criticism is that he was almost too compelling to be a young Robin because he would have completely upstaged Batman in this film. So, hat’s off to you, Joe!

One thing I have to bring up is the set design/cinematography. I get heat for this all the time, but I PERSONALLY don’t think that Nolan’s films are that visually interesting. Maybe (ok, most likely) I just don’t respond to his specific aesthetic, but I, yet again, wasn’t terribly impressed with the look of this film. I mean, he clearly has a thing: dudes in suits, chicks in gowns, hotel lobbies, palatial mansions, urban city streets, etc. But I’m getting a weeeee bit tired of the same dark, muted colors and generic costumes and same 3 sets in every movie. Not to mention all the shadows and side lighting that feel totally stale. Although given the “dark, gritty, real” take on the Batman franchise I suppose it was fitting. And the scene at the football field was undoubtedly badass. I just want something wacky to happen like a purple Nurf ball to come in and bit Bane in the face or something. That’s most definitely just me, though.

Oh and also Gary Oldman was good obviously.

So, that being said, I still definitely enjoyed this film. It kept me totally engaged in the plot the whole time. Perhaps that’s because the entire film was basically driven by the plot. So, in that regard, it was highly successful. But nothing really lingered for me. It didn’t inspire much thought otherwise. But, as Joe Gilis would have said, I guess I’m just “one of the message kids. Just a story won’t do”. Maybe I WOULD have turned down Gone With The Wind. But as chaotic as it may have been, I’m glad I spent a ridiculous amount of money at the Arclight to see it.

So, while taking a virtual stroll through the internet the other day I stumbled across a little photographer I once followed named Cindy Sherman. Now, I’ve taken a handful of photography and photography-related courses throughout my schooling, but I don’t think I’ve ever really studied Cindy Sherman’s work in the arena of academia before. So, if any of what I’m about to say seems glib or under-researched, I apologize. There is just something really compelling about her stuff that I thought I’d take a minute to talk about. And it’s not just compelling in each piece as one salient image, but in the bizarre range of her catalog. Her photos (and her sculptures, to that end) straddle this bizarre line between formal and experimental. Between glamorous and grotesque. Between classic and cheap. First and foremost, I’m particularly interested by her representation of the female gender. I like to think of her progression of her work as a dark process of self-discovery. In her earlier photos, she always seems to situate herself in very rigid societal “sctructures” in which she’s somehow marginalized by her own presence. In her early self-portraits, she really plays up her role as a woman. Look at what she’s doing: she’s washing dishes, she’s fetching a book from the library, she’s all dolled up in her best gown standing by her vanity. Everything is poised to perfection, but she as a subject seems peripheral. When set against the backdrop of a New York cityscape, she looks bewildered and out of place. At the kitchen sink she’s distracted and staring down some imagined third person outside the frame. Even when she’s all done up in her finest clothes, all she can seem to do is languish on her bed. To draw a silly yet more contemporary comparison, she reminds me of the female protagonists in an animated Disney film: they’re always so bored and wistful within the walls of their regimented, relegated female lives. It seems like she’s just waiting to make some kind of escape. However, she also seems hyper-aware that someone is looking at her. For every wistful gaze and pregnant sigh, she has this poise to her that makes it very clear she wants you to look at her.

It’s still a voyeuristic sensation, though. We’re looking in at her as if she’s in a fishbowl. Everything that she does is staged and, in a sense, contrived. In her later work, we see her finally get out of that head of hers (or, actually, even deeper in her head). From a more obvious visual standpoint, she transitions from black and white to color photography. But as her photos get more “colorful”, they also get much darker and more personal. In every way that her earlier work seems staged and voyeuristic, the later pieces completely unravel as if the grotesque innards of her mind just come dumping out. Here she ditches the visual landscape of, arguably, the “hyper-real” and dives head first into the surreal. She takes herself as a subject and completely eliminates any context at all. It’s not about that anymore. It’s not about this space that she’s forced to exist in anymore. The new “space” that her photos exist in is the often frightening space of her own psyche. She is bearing herself to us.

But the visceral shock of these images would never have been so starkly punctuated without the notion of her earlier work. And the role of gender starts to blur in these later photographs. We see Cindy herself augmenting her body and her face to look more like a man in some cases. And, on the other side of that coin, we see her completely augmenting her form to exaggerate and even satirize her own femininity. She also plays with segmenting the human form. She creates models or replicas of bodies that are simply disembodied genitalia. Some of which feature both male and female genitalia at once. So this motif of contradiction extends beyond just the style of the photograph, but the form of the subject itself (how terribly post-modern, for lack of a better buzz-word). It’s as if the body is just this thing. We all have one, some are different, but so what? Let’s just deconstruct it and play with the pieces.

But what makes this so interesting is that tension (bearing in mind her tendency to blur forms/styles) between how bizarre and yet how funny they seem to be. They’re stylized to the point of being campy. But even with that obvious level of camp, nothing ever feels too gimmicky or exploitative. You feel the sense that Cindy feels genuinely compelled to embody these characters. As if we’re peering into her brain and seeing these different cogs of her persona working all at once. And in every person, there are so many facets that exist simultaneously; everyone has a glamorous side, a grotesque side, a silly side etc. She is able to visually manipulate herself to embody these sides of herself. Of course in doing so, she takes these sides and exaggerates them to a whole new extreme. And of course, aside from all that, her photos are all just dynamic and interesting and intriguing. So, let’s all tip our hats to that wacky lady who is totally comfortable bearing every side of herself to us…Cindy Sherman.

Women have always been a band of contradictions. Blending sleek, tight songwriting with unpredictably experimental riffs. After every blissed out nugget of pure, feel-good pop, the band leads us down a darker, more uncertain road where their rock-leanings start to weigh heavy. On their self-titled debut, the band found itself having a harder time negotiating the space between these two worlds. While each track fit one way or the other, the album felt somewhat polarized and at odds with itself. On Public Strain, Women are more comfortable in their own skin. This sophomore release finds a much more mature and confident band fleshing out their sound and effortlessly collapsing the line between the experimental and the pop.

If their first record was a cursory exploration into the genre, Public Strain finishes what Women started. Here, each song is given time to gestate. From the languid, yet sonically ripe opener to the poetically optimistic closing track, each song feels like more of a complete statement. Where earlier tracks like “Cameras” or “Group Transport Hall” felt staunched by the band’s somewhat gratuitous brevity, songs here like “Heat Distraction” and “Locust Valley” are able to harness the band’s pop-sensibility while still fostering that wandering sense of discovery that makes the band flourish.

Public Strain also leaps ahead of the debut in its much more evolved sense of grandeur. Each song here sounds bigger, more resonant, and, most importantly, more emotionally charged than ever before. On “Venice Lockjaw”, the band shows itself not being afraid to be vulnerable and sincere. The gentle strum of the guitar, the understated beat, and the earnest but never mawkish vocals flow like water in this ballad. Each delicate little pluck of the strings feels like a drop of rain falling outside while someone lies in bed with you and tells you their deepest secrets. This is somewhat of a new territory for Women, one that they fit into beautifully. With this newfound sense of emotional intensity, the album feels more poetic and cinematic, and hits with much more impact.

There is one unfortunate flaw here, however. “Penal Colony” sits in the middle of this album like a dead weight. The repetitive, tedious beat, the half-baked melody, and the unimaginative sonic arrangement languish in this track, and to no good end. As Flagel croons “faces start to blend/meets a sudden end/ and you’re gone completely”, it feels less like a wistful, nihilistic meditation and more like a sad, pretentious cliché.

Having said that, Women have crafted an outstanding second album here. Public Strain is still very much loyal to the band’s signature sound, but further investigates what they are capable of. While the songwriting expands and wanders deeper into new territory here, the album ultimately feels tighter in scope and vision. Every rough edge from the debut is deftly smoothed out on Public Strain. As the wall between the traditional and the unpredictable slowly crumbles away here, Women show us that there is a very powerful and exciting space in between.