Tag: The Dark Knight

Actor’s Spotlight: Nate’s Top Ten Gary Oldman Performances

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Gary Oldman is both one of my personal favourite actors and an absolute champion of the craft, an adaptable master of any role thrown at him who can take words on a page and lift them to magnificent heights in his work. Intense, implosive, focused, hard working and super dynamic in front of a camera, he’s always an actor to watch and an undisputed master of his craft. I love each and every performance this man has given us so far in a brilliantly diverse career, but here are the ten characters that stand out the most for me:

10. Charlie Strom in Sin

Bear with me on this one. Like any actor, Gary has appeared in a few duds, and overall this happens to be one of them *but* his performance in it is fantastic. Ving Rhames plays a tough ex cop whose sister (Kerry Washington) is raped and brutalized on Oldman’s orders as some kind of underworld porn king. A deadly game of cat and mouse ensues in which Rhames seeks revenge for the atrocity but discovers that Oldman targeted him for reasons of his own going back into both their pasts. It’s a decent script given the scrappy low budget treatment but Oldman’s tormented villain is worth sitting through for. He has a conversation with Rhames midway through the film that gets philosophical in nature and overall he just nails the haunted persona of this role.

9. O.W. Grant in Bob Gale’s Interstate 60

This is a playful role in one heinously overlooked hidden gem. Essentially an existential road trip movie with supernatural elements and enough cameos to launch a pilot, Gary plays a mysterious genie like deity who grants everyone he sees one wish by blowing green smoke from his monkey shaped pipe. He also has no reproductive organs, as a hitchhiking nymphomaniac chick hilariously discovers. It’s light, easygoing work from the actor who isn’t doing any heavy lifting with the performance yet still makes a terrific comedic impact and seems like he’s having a lot of fun.

8. George Smiley in Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

John Le Carré’s chilly Cold War thriller sees Oldman take on the role of an MI6 lieutenant embroiled in the treacherous search for a soviet spy amongst his own ranks. Restrained and opaque, one begins to see the keen scrutiny hiding behind the character’s initially withdrawn nature. When an event causes him to almost lose that composure, he expertly shows the emotions bursting forth and the efforts to keep them within, reaching a pitch perfect note of performance that gets better and more detailed every time you revisit the film.

7. Jackie Flannery in Phil Joanou’s State Of Grace

One of the great crime dramas he has taken on, this one sees him play a volatile, unstable Irish gangster in NYC’s brutal Hell’s Kitchen, stick between his mob boss older brother (Ed Harris) and childhood friend (Sean Penn) who is now an undercover cop infiltrating their ranks. With a mop of greasy hair and the mannerisms of an untrained dog let off the leash, this is a ballistic tornado of a characterization with childlike notes, a good dose of rambunctious restlessness and primal violent nature uncaged.

6. Sirius Black in Alfonso Cuaron’s Harry Potter & The Prisoner Of Azkaban

From the moment we see gaunt, haunted eyed convict Black onscreen Gary makes him a magnetic, spooky presence to be reckoned with. Even before that we see him howling out of moving wanted posters in Diagon Alley and off the front page of the Daily Prophet. Oldman makes juxtaposed genius out of his work here and the shift from scary fugitive to compassionate friend and mentor to Harry is handled beautifully. It’s also nice to see him and fellow British thespian David Thewlis collectively chewing scenery, they have palpable chemistry and I’d love to see a buddy cop thing with them one day, or something like that.

5. Jack Grimaldi in Peter Medak’s Romeo Is Bleeding

The ultimate corrupt cop, Oldman’s Jack is a loose cannon dirtbag who discovers that his ways have consequences when his life is made into a living hell by terrifying femme fatale Mona Demarkhov (Lena Olin) and ruthless mafia don Falcone (Roy Schneider). He inhabits the sweaty, desperate neo-noir palette of this great film very well, especially in sly, mournful voiceover as he literally narrates his own story as if it didn’t happen to him.

4. Dracula In Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Francis Ford Coppola outdoes himself with this lavish, baroque piece of eye candy that for me is the best film version of Dracula ever made, likewise for Gary’s knockout performance as the titular vampire king. He has several incarnations here from armoured Transylvanian knight to skeletal senior citizen to dashing foreign prince to full on nine foot gorilla werewolf hell-beast thing and he rocks each one with full blooded embodiment and spectacular verve. Surrounded by solid players like Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Sadie Frost, Keanu Reeves, Cary Elwes, Richard E. Grant and Tom Waits in an encore as the lunatic Renfield, this is a magnificent dark jewel of a film and a horror masterpiece.

3. James Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises

The actor goes inward here for a fierce, gritty turn as the legendary police commissioner, giving the character all the salt of the earth integrity and brooding charisma we could hope to get. In a career full of extravagant portrayals and amidst a trilogy riddled with flamboyant villains and people who dress up in costumes, ironically he gets to play the most down to earth and level headed guy, comparatively. His Gordon is a straight arrow cop who is fallible, tactical and compassionate.

2. Drexl Spivey in Tony Scott’s True Romance

A white pimp who thinks he’s black, this has to be the single most impactful performance ever filmed that only takes up one five minute scene and another brief thirty second one. Dreadlocks, gnarly scars, a dead eye, leopard print housecoat, this guy couldn’t be more visually ridiculous but for all the flourish and swagger, it’s Gary’s mannerisms that shine through and win the day. The goal of his scene is essentially to circle and intimidate Christian Slater before pouncing on him like a pissed off coyote, and he succeeds in freaking him out plus the rest of the world watching on their screens. This film is filled with memorable moments scene after scene but his mad dog portrayal of this reprehensibly hilarious Detroit gutter-rat piece of shit stands out.

1. Norman Stansfield in Luc Besson’s Leon The Professional

I’m not sure what Besson’s direction to Oldman was in playing this spectacularly corrupt DEA agent but he kind of just runs off and does his own thing to the point where other actors in the scene look scared of him for real. Casually homicidal, easily distracted, highly unstable and so intense he frequently goes red in the face, this is a villain that would frighten most others into submission. Contrasted with Jean Reno’s and Natalie Portman’s more contemplative performances he’s the wild card of this tale and fills it to the brim with madness, firepower, dark humour and that trademark white suit that you better not get blood on or he’ll shoot you after he’s already killed you in a crazed tantrum of scenery chewing that only Gary Oldman is capable of.

Thanks for reading ! Please share you favourite Gary Oldman performances as well!

-Nate Hill

SBIFF Maltin Modern Master Awards Gary Oldman

by Frank Mengarelli, posted in Film Review, Santa Barbara International Film Festival

Gary Oldman is charming. He’s effortless and he’s incredibly affable, which is a stark contrast to many of the prickly characters he’s most well known for playing. He spoke with Leonard Maltin for a little under two hours before the dapper and coarse Ben Mendelsohn presented him with the Maltin Modern Master Award.

Oldman said it was seeing Malcom McDowell in THE RAGING MOON that lit the burning desire for him to pursue a career in acting, which led to Oldman being turned down by a premiere drama school in England where a lot of the greats had studied, including Peter O’Toole.

Oldman spoke about how he fanboy gushed over John Hurt while working with him on TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, Anthony Hopkins during the filming of DRACULA, and over Denzel Washington while working with him on the set of THE BOOK OF ELI.

A very charming moment in the show was when Maltin showed a clip from a Harry Potter film, and Oldman went on to speak about his fondness for the young co-stars he worked with and how they were like a family, and he watched them grow up over the course of ten years. It was a very special period of his career for him, stating that his fanbase went from forty year olds to ten year olds overnight.

During the filming of BATMAN BEGINS, Oldman attributed James Gordon’s world weariness to jetlag, due to the fact that he was flying from LA to England a day or two at a time to film his scenes, not staying on set due to the fact of being a single dad and raising his two young sons.

Maltin asked Oldman about his character of George Smiley, and asked if he would be playing him again. He responded with an almost certain yes, telling Maltin that he really loved playing Smiley, and missed that character dearly. Asked about his preparation for Smiley, Oldman said that he was overly particular on the glasses his character would be wearing, and that he tried on at least one hundred pairs before settling on the pair that was used in the film.

When asked about his many accents he’s used, from Dracula to Churchill, Oldman said he uses not a voice coach, but an opera singer to condition his voice to drop or gain octivs, and once he is done filming said character he essentially unlearns how to speak that way, saying it’s like a muscle and that he can no longer recreate the Dracula voice or his Churchill voice on command.

Ben Mendelsohn was there to present Oldman with the Maltin Modern Master Award once the Q&A was finished. Mendelsohn gave a speech only he could give with his token outback roughness and lewd wit, speaking of Oldman’s many masterpiece performances and how he is one of his idols.

Gary Oldman is a cinematic treasure. He has crisscrossed many aspect of film from hard independent pictures, genre films, as well megabudget franchises. His latest turn as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s DARKEST HOUR will surely award him the Best Actor Oscar, which for a performer like Oldman an Academy Award is long overdue.

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises

by natewatchescoolmovies, posted in Film Review

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises faced a tricky maneuver: providing a follow up to the earth shattering, delirious success that was 2008’s The Dark Knight. The film was never going to be as good as or better than that lightning in a bottle stroke of genius. However, the film we did get is one epic, operatic sonic boom of a Batman film, and if there’s one area where it does in fact outdo The Dark Knight, it’s in scope. The action set pieces here have an earth shattering, monumental quality to them, mainly thanks to Tom Hardy’s Bane, a full on monster who brings biblical destruction to Gotham City with some calculated, maximum impact attacks that almost blow the speakers of any system they’re shown on. Despite the apocalyptic blitzkrieg, Nolan loses none of that precious philosophy that has made this franchise glow so far, the sharp-as-a-tack dialogue and moral complexities of existing in a world of vigilantes and terrorists. It’s been eight years in Gotham since Batman took down the Joker and, somewhat controversially, the fallen angel that was Harvey Dent. Bruce Wayne has become a crippled recluse while the city more or less flourishes quietly, but there’s nothing that’ll roust a burg out of tranquil slumber like the arrival of a seven foot tall, highly trained psychopath bent on chaos. In a vertigo inducing opener set atop the clouds, Bane triumphantly crashes a CIA aircraft and makes off with its cargo, a mere taste of his brutality to come. Bruce is forced out of hiding to do battle with him, and before you know it they’re all thundering around Gotham’s tunnels and edifices, pursued by hordes of snarky GCPD, who no doubt have missed this kind of action for a near decade. The new commissioner (Matthew Modine) is a hotheaded nimrod, while Gordon (Gary Oldman, the gravitas is real with this guy) still hurts from the tragedy years before. Anne Hathaway throws a wicked curveball of a performance as Selina ‘Catwoman’ Kyle, and although no one will ever, *ever* top Michelle Pfeiffer’s brilliantly kinky turn years before, she’s a deadly force to be reckoned with both for Bruce and the criminal factions vying for power. Hathaway seems like a sanitized choice for the cat, but she’s deft, sexy, formidable, competent and looks damn good in that outfit careening around on Bruce’s batbike. Marion Cotillard is great as the mysterious Miranda Tate who may be more dangerous than she seems, a shtick which Cotillard unnervingly perfected first in Inception. Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine are top notch as Alfred and Lucius once again, Ben Mendelsohn plays up a sleazy business rival for Bruce, Juno Temple is cute as Selina’s off again, on again lover, Joseph Gordon Levitt’s intrepid detective gets a whole lot of plot momentum and crazy good dialogue, and the jaw dropping lineup of supporting work includes Brett Cullen, Burn Gorman, Desmond Harrington, Chris Ellis, Robert Wisdom, Tomas Arana, Aiden Gillen, Brent Briscoe, William Devane, Nestor Carbonell, Reggie Lee, Wade Williams, Christopher Judge, a brief reprisal from Liam Neeson and Cillian Murphy as that pesky Scarecrow, the only villain who appears in all three films. The story goes to places the other two films never ascended to, and if the Joker thought his antics aspired to anarchy, he’d do flips when Bane literally starts blowing up the city on a massive scale, an extended sequence that’s delirious in it’s armageddon worthy panic. On a more personal scale, Batman deals with being broken, the cost he must pay to ultimately save his city, and the unknowable matter of when to cash out as a superhero, or forever give up your soul to a fight that has neither end nor reason. My only issue with the story is how a certain third act revelation pretty much neuters Bane’s character arc and renders his whole fearsome nature somewhat too human and redundant when all is said and done, it’s a narrative decision Nolan should examine closely for his own sake, and avoid such an impotent cop-out when writing his next arch villain. The cinematography is aces, the cgi blending seamless, Hans Zimmer’s score gives us the classic thunderstorm passages we’ve come to love while adding a rhythmic chanting for further depth and flavour. There’s not much that can be said that’s negative about the film, it’s one hell of an achievement and doesn’t let up until the Big Bang of an ending provides release for the franchise and every character in it, an expository epilogue in which loose ends are tied, and some semblance of peace is found. A near perfect third act to the trilogy, and a superhero flick for the ages.

-Nate Hill

One Bloody Good Actor: An Interview with Steve Le Marquand by Kent Hill

by Kent Hill, posted in Interviews

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Steve is a top bloke, he’s an Aussie, he’s a top Aussie bloke. He hails from Western Australia but after spending some years on the road and gathering valuable life experience, he found his way over to Sydney where he took up his apprenticeship studying performing arts – an apprenticeship, Steve will tell you, is still going on.

Early in an acting career, beggars can’t be choosers, so Steve took a stab at just about anything that came his way. One of his launching pads was a, determined after the fact, rather sacrilegious commercial in which The Last Supper had, or was depicted as having, a rather different outcome from that set down in the biblical text.

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It, though removed from television, got him some notice and a part in the Australian cult hit Two Hands in which Steve starred and began a friendship with fellow Perth-born actor, the late Heath Ledger. It was radically different from the films being made locally at the time and also launched the career of Rose Byrne (Troy, X-Men: First Class).

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He was disgruntled and ready to throw in the towel on his career when, unexpectedly, a big Hollywood movie came knocking at his door. The film was Vertical Limit, directed by Bond and Zorro director Martin Campbell and starring Scott Glenn and the late Bill Paxton among others. Steve was one half of a two man comedic relief package in the film alongside Ben Mendelsohn who would go on to international fame and appear in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and next year you’ll see him in Ernest Cline’s big screen version of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg.

From those high snowy mountains in New Zealand (where Vertical Limit was filmed), Steve has since enjoyed a long a fruitful career in film, television and his first stomping ground, the theatre. He remains a humble, salt-of -the-earth sort of fella who calls it like it is and won’t act in something that he himself wouldn’t be interesting in watching.

In an era when most of our country’s talent is swept across the pond with the promise of maximum exposure and ridiculous amounts of money, Steve has stayed, content to be an actor who is allowed the freedom to collaborate fully on the projects he chooses to be a part of.

He is a man of many parts, a teller of great and funny tales from a life and career spent being just what he is: A bloody good actor.

So, put your hands to together, for Steve Le Marquand…

Episode 23: Chicago Films with Mike Krumlauf

by Frank Mengarelli, posted in Film Review, Podcast

Episode 23

We were joined by Chicago native and independent filmmaker, Mike Krumlauf.  The three of us discuss our favorite films set and/or shot in Chicago.  We had a great time chatting, and hope you guys enjoy the chat as much as we enjoyed recording it!

 

CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE DARK KNIGHT – A REVIEW BY NICK CLEMENT

by nlclement, posted in Film Review

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At this point, there isn’t much left to be said about The Dark Knight. The film grossed almost a billion dollars worldwide and its critical acclaim vaulted its director, Christopher Nolan, into the upper stratosphere of big-budget filmmakers. It’s a masterwork of comic book moviemaking, talking iconic imagery and filtering them through the prism of a Michael Mann crime epic, and featuring a tour de force performance by Heath Ledger as the most sinful of all superhero antagonists, The Joker. While I will always prefer the epic nature of The Dark Knight Rises (flaws and all, it’s my favorite in the Nolan series), there’s something so lean and tough-guy-poetic about The Dark Knight; it really does feel like Heat featuring men in masks. Picking up right where he left off after his excellent franchise re-boot Batman Begins, Nolan essentially made his first effort look like a student film by comparison, and that’s not to knock Begins, because it’s a wonderful piece of entertainment, a movie that reimagined Batman for a modern, more visceral style of storytelling within this particular genre. And what’s particularly awesome, and where the film is better than The Dark Knight Rises, is that The Dark Knight is both epic and intimate; this is a massive crime saga, taking cues from the aforementioned Heat and Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, but never forgetting to stay true to the intense character dynamics that have made this universe of costumed freaks so especially memorable. By placing Batman and all of his cronies and adversaries in a real world setting, no matter how stylized his Gotham City is, Nolan was able to fashion a trilogy of films that felt all the more tangible and immediate, something that not one, single Marvel effort has ever done, with the possible exception of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Batman, again played with gritty determination by Christian Bale, who brought stoic seriousness to his dual performance as Bruce Wayne/Batman, is caught between his own sense of vigilante justice, crossed with deeper psychological issues. In The Dark Knight, the Nolans and David S. Goyer, stacked the deck with his arch nemesis, the Joker, played with such menacing glee by Ledger that you have to just assume that the preparation and performance might have affected his psyche; his posthumous Oscar trophy was indeed fully warranted, and not some nonsense done for sentimentality or good-faced-publicity as some dunderheads have suggested in the past. The plot is multi-layered, convoluted yet not impenetrable, and steeped in crime movie mythology that speaks both to classic film noir and the graphic novel roots that Nolan favored. The Joker is out to bring down Batman, while also trying to put a stranglehold on Gotham’s City’s overall criminal element. From the steely, Mann-esque precision of the film’s opening bank robbery sequence; you get the sense that Ledger’s Joker isn’t a playful clown, but rather, a certifiable psychopath. The way he licks his scarred lips and the way his sinister cackle fills a room with eerie rage are just two of the ways that Ledger left an indelible mark on this classic comic book icon; I wonder if any other actor will be up to the challenge in future installments. Harvey Dent, an excellent Aaron Eckhart, is trying to clean the streets up from city hall, and Jim Gordon, played with low-key integrity by Gary Oldman, is working his way up the police chain of command. Various gangsters figure into the plot and there is a morally complex chain of events that figures into the film’s gripping climax. But the real show is the duel between Batman and the Joker, and it’s here, with two of the comic-world’s most beloved characters, that The Dark Knight really excels.

Nolan, reteaming with his phenomenal cinematographer Wally Pfister, bathed the film in shadows and blacks; this is a dark movie, both in theme and in appearance, but in the end, serving a stylistic and narrative purpose. The tragic nature of Harvey Dent is highlighted in a powerful character arc that exposes the many faces (literal and metaphorical) to the character; Eckhart’s performance was one of his absolute best. And then there’s the film’s major action scene, occurring at the half-way mark, which is a towering triumph of choreography, seamless CGI integration, and old-fashioned movie magic. By the end of this haunting and beautifully crafted piece of explosive entertainment, the viewer can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. The Dark Knight was one of the first superhero films to never feel like a traditional superhero film, and the topical, real-world grounding that Nolan infused into his trilogy has been felt on other, future projects from a variety of other filmmakers. And yet, at the end of 2008, the old farts in the Academy felt like dissing one of the most successful films of all time, which was truly a shame, because the film stands as a genre centerpiece, and a reminder that art within this particular canvass is still attainable even when toys and lunchboxes are being considered; rarely does big-budget, summertime filmmaking become this successful at fusing all of the creative elements together.