By Matt Singer

Since 1940's "Batman" #4, and his first movie serial three years later, the Caped Crusader has called Gotham City his home. On screen and on the printed page, its visual representation has changed quite a bit over almost 70 years. At times, the look of the metropolis has been an afterthought; at others, directors have paid more attention to Gotham's appearance than to the characters living in it, and its latest appearance, in Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," may be its most unusual yet. (None the least for sparking a heated New York/Chicago debate.) Here's a look at eight movies full of gargoyles, dark alleys, and, yes, big naked statues.

Batman (1943)
Directed by Lambert Hillyer
Production Designer: Uncredited

This bargain basement production didn't even bother giving the Dynamic Duo a Batmobile, letting them make do with a generic black sedan, so it's no surprise Gotham is equally indistinct. The "Gotham City Foundation" is just a backlot street, and the chase scenes look an awful lot like the Bronson Canyon back roads where the '60s "Batman" would eventually house its Batcave. The only memorable location is Gotham's "Little Tokyo" where the serial's shockingly racist narrator informs us "a wise government" has rounded up all the residents and sent them off to internment camps, turning it into a "virtual ghost street." It makes for a nice contrast with the numerous scenes set on streets with some un-Gotham-like white picket fences; apparently, Mayberry is one of the town's rarely discussed suburbs.

By Matt Singer in Features | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (2)

Tags: Batman, Batman & Robin, Batman Begins, Batman Forever, Batman Returns, Gotham City, The Dark Knight

By Dan Kennedy

Scene in "Repo Man" when Emilio Estevez tells Kevin to quit singing the 7-Up theme song, shoves him into a display of cans, then walks backwards out of store with both middle fingers extended toward the advancing security guard.

Scene in "Superbad" when Seth asks Evan, "What, so I gotta sit here and eat my dessert alone like I'm fuckin' Steven Glansberg?" (Cut to the aforementioned Steven Glansberg eating alone at another table.)

Bill Murray on the ride from airport to hotel upon arrival in Tokyo in the opening credits of "Lost in Translation."

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Tags: Dan Kennedy

By Aaron Hillis

A quick refresher for the six of you who need it: "Mumblecore" (c. 2005 - 2007?) is the hastily designated catch-all for a loosely allied circle of young American filmmakers utilizing a low-budget, documentary-esque shooting style for their talky DIY indies. Regardless of whether you like any of the individual films, odds are you're either (a) tired of hearing that overhyped word, (b) have never heard it before now, or (c) one of the Duplass brothers. Actor/filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass — whose witty road-trip dramedy "The Puffy Chair" became one of the first m-word successes — are quite comfortable with their association to that so-called movement/genre/clique, and why shouldn't they be, considering Sony Pictures Classics has released their follow-up feature? (Talk about mumble-score, har har!)

"Baghead" stars Steve Zissis, Ross Partridge, Greta Gerwig and Elise Muller as four friends and wannabe thespians who hole up in a cabin for a weekend of collaborative screenwriting on their dream project... until a mysterious stalker with a paper bag on his head shows up. Reminiscent of the Duplasses' inventive shorts about relationships, their unusual new genre mash-up is prankish one moment, scary and suspenseful the next, and it's for the best to give nothing else away. Mark and Jay occasionally finished each other's sentences while yakking about lovable losers and the meta-aspects of promoting their film, but let's get down to brass tacks:

By Aaron Hillis in Interviews | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (4)

Tags: Baghead, Elise Muller, Greta Gerwig, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, mumblecore, Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, The Puffy Chair

By Michael Atkinson

The behemothic, almost impossible to see, hardcore-critic-exalted art film legends keep coming at us on DVD — will there be any Holy Grails left? — but it's likely that no movie has been awaited as intensely and with as high expectations as Béla Tarr's "Satantango" (1994). Finally, after literally years of rumors and broken promises and restoration troubles, Facets has brought this cathedral of a movie to disc, and we can all explore its frontiers at will. Not that we all will — "Satantango" is one of those films that, because of its size (nearly seven hours), form (long-take extremism) and weighty thrust (ambiguous Hungarian existentialism), has always worn the mantle of being a cinephiles' test case, an experience that separates the apostles from the pretenders. Maybe Tarr made it with that in mind — by its very nature, the film intends to be an immersive trial. You don't just watch "Satantango" — you live it, your biorhythms adjust to it, and the upshot is not what you'd call a walk on the bright side of the street.

By Michael Atkinson in On DVD | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (4)

Tags: Béla Tarr, Eagle Shooting Heroes, Jeffrey Lau, László Krasznahorkai, Satantango, Wong Kar-wai

By Matt Singer and Alison Willmore

Finding a good vehicle for a great comedian can be tough -- the ability to be funny doesn't always come hand in hand with the ability to act, and the film needs to work with a comedian's persona and particular strengths. A few recent or upcoming films have done brilliantly bad jobs of this -- most notably "Run Fatboy Run," with Simon Pegg, but to a lesser extent "The Rocker" with Rainn Wilson and "Hamlet 2" with Steve Coogan. This week on the IFC News podcast, we look at ten past films that have, in different ways, squandered the comedic talent attached to them.

Download now (MP3: 32:39 minutes, 29.8 MB)

Podcast feeds: [XML] [iTunes]

[Photo: "Run Fatboy Run," Picturehouse Entertainment, 2007]

By Alison Willmore in Podcasts | Link | 2 Comments | Recommended (2)

Tags: Hamlet 2, Run Fatboy Run, The Rocker

By Neil Pedley

With blockbusters taking a week off after "The Dark Knight" so thoroughly conquered the box office and its core audience descends upon Comic-Con in San Diego, an outstanding array from the indie scene offers plenty of alternative viewing.

"American Teen"
Her longtime collaborator Brett Morgen may be out of the picture, but "The Kid Stays in the Picture" co-director Nanette Burstein infiltrated the cliques, classrooms and hallways of an Indiana high school for her first solo doc, which netted her a directing award at Sundance earlier this year. Burstein follows a cross section of Warsaw High's senior class for 10 months in pursuit of their respective ambitions and priorities, and discovers that bonding at the library during Saturday detention is no way to communicate when text messaging and IM can be just as intimate.
Opens in limited release.

By Neil Pedley in In Theaters | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (2)

By Matt Singer

When the "Batman" movie franchise had grown too swollen with campy performances and benippled costumes to survive, Warner Brothers went back to the drawing board. But they didn't just bring on a new director or actor to play Batman; they restarted the entire franchise. And if 2005's "Batman Begins," directed by Christopher Nolan, could have been written off as an elaborately reimagined prequel - since Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman" did not fully explain how Bruce Wayne became Batman or feature "Begins" villains the Scarecrow or Ra's Al Ghul - there could be no lingering doubt with Nolan's new Bat-follow-up, "The Dark Knight," where we get a totally new take on The Joker, courtesy of the late Heath Ledger.

Starting over a movie franchise based on a comic book from scratch is a fitting move; comic books have been doing the same thing for years. When these lumbering behemoths of backstory become too unwieldy, or sales get too bad (or, most often, a deadly cocktail of the two) then it's time to start the series over from scratch (or at least to pretend like the old comics never happened and retell them again for a new audience). Here are five notable examples:

By Matt Singer in Lists | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (6)

Tags: Batman, Fantastic Four, Legion of Super-Heroes, Spider-Man, superheroes, Superman, The Dark Knight, The Man of Steel

By Aaron Hillis

By now, writer/director Brad Anderson ("Session 9") must be bored to death of people asking him about Christian Bale's monumental weight loss for "The Machinist," perhaps the most memorably disturbing image from his still-under-the-radar career. (Could this be the same Brad Anderson who once made quirky rom-coms like "Next Stop Wonderland" and "Happy Accidents"? Indeed, it is.) After taking on episodes of "The Wire" and "Masters of Horror," Anderson returns to features with the moody, diabolically suspenseful "Transsiberian," starring Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer as an American couple on a church-sponsored charity mission in China who soon face moral dilemmas and enigmatic strangers on the titular train to Russia. Of course ol' Hitch came up in my conversation with Anderson, but so did Dostoyevsky, hipster thrillers and the in-the-works adaptation he wishes he could've made. [WARNING: Major spoilers ahead!]

By Aaron Hillis in Interviews | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (3)

Tags: Brad Anderson, Emily Mortimer, Session 9, The Machinist, Transsiberian, Woody Harrelson

By Aaron Hillis

In the mere decade he's been filling movie screens, 30-year-old actor Josh Hartnett has already worked in both mega-budget studio flicks ("Pearl Harbor," "Hollywood Homicide") and with auteurs like Sofia Coppola ("The Virgin Suicides"), Robert Rodriguez ("The Faculty," "Sin City") and Brian De Palma ("The Black Dahlia"). Maintaining his stance with one foot in Hollywood, the other currently leaning more heavily in Indiewood, Hartnett's latest — which he also co-produced — is a time warp back to New York during the summer of 2001. Only marginally a pre-9/11 film, director Austin Chick's "August" is an implosive study in hubris set against the backdrop of the dot-com economic meltdown. Hartnett plays Tom Sterling, a narcissistic millionaire CEO who is far more concerned with his materialistic rock star image than he is for Landshark, the sinking ship of a company that he began with his brother Joshua (Adam Scott). Hartnett chatted with me about the film, why he considers himself a gambler, and being intimidated by co-star David Bowie.

By Aaron Hillis in Interviews | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (8)

Tags: August, David Bowie, Josh Hartnett, Rain Man, Tom Cruise

By Michael Atkinson

It's amazing to contemplate, but world cinema didn't really make serious feature films about children until after WWII; Vittorio De Sica's "Shoeshine" (1946) might've been the first. (You could stretch and consider Hal Roach's vivid and roughhewn "Our Gang" shorts as qualifying, and I wouldn't argue.) After the New Waves got rolling, of course, juveniles proliferated like rabbits on screen, but prior to that nearly the first half of cinema history had little or nothing to say about the bedeviled, often neglected, wide-eyed life of the pre-adult. Did cinema change with the war, or did we? Two new movies to DVD, Reha Erdem's "Times and Winds" (2006) and Ramin Bahrani's "Chop Shop" (2007), make their individual cases that little outside of the movie dynamic has changed at all, and that life as a 12-year-old in any corner of the globe is still subject to the grinding, merciless self-involvement of the adult world.

By Michael Atkinson in On DVD | Link | 0 Comments | Recommended (2)

Tags: Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani, Reha Erdem, Times and Winds