Et pour ce qui est de l'unanimité, deux textes d'un de mes critiques favoris, après Roger Ebert :
Citer:
Why So Pretentious? The Dark Knight, The Edge of Heaven, Mamma Mia!
By Fernando F. Croce
The Dark Knight is middling as a summer blockbuster, zero as art, and more than a bit alarming as a phenomenon. Christopher Nolan is a director who in six films hasn't stumbled upon a single human emotion, yet the opening of his new contraption, a nasty yet efficient bank holdup that introduces the late Heath Ledger as The Joker, is true, virile filmmaking. His staccato grace dissolves during the ludicrously blurry action sequences, but, if he can resist the urge to edit a car chase with a garbage disposal, Nolan might one day grab Walter Hill's torch. The difference is that Hill takes comic book-like material (Johnny Handsome, say) and turns it into pulp spectacle, while Nolan, dealing with a real comic book, puffs it up with bogus profundities and counterfeit "darkness." For the sequel to his Batman Begins, Nolan has an appropriately schematic structure: Christian Bale's tortured-millionaire-cum-caped-vigilante Bruce Wayne on one side, Ledger's sadistic pagliacci on the other, and Aaron Eckhart's untouchable DA Harvey Dent waiting in the middle for the Two-Face split. Gotham City is supposed to be a stand-in for our troubled zeitgeist, full of the kind of fear and moral confusion a self-proclaimed "terrorist" jack-in-the-box can feed on. Pungent concepts. Tastefully laid out on the table and spelled out for the viewer with dialogue-balloons ("You're the symbol of hope I could never be," Batman tells Dent), that's all they remain -- concepts. For such an allegedly ferocious narrative, this is an unaccountably chilly and antiseptic movie, as plodding and jejune (and as satisfied with its own "subversion") as the screen version of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta.
To be fair, The Dark Knight did provide the most chilling moment I have had at the movies all summer. I giggled at the ridiculous growl Bale employed from under his Batman mask, and was readily met with death stares from my neighboring viewers: Holy Mass had been violated. Please. Dude dresses like a bat, and suddenly cinema at long last fulfills its potential? It's bad enough when rabid fanboys become so prissy about the film's "awesomeness" that they fuse into one huge, fat-assed Comic Book Guy declaring "Worst critic ever!" at any questioning review; it's doubly depressing when the critics themselves swallow the hype machine's baby food and call it caviar for the ages. Ledger's Joker, for instance, has already been deemed a villain worthy of anthologies and posthumous awards, but kindness to a dead artist does no favors to the living -- for all the smeared make-up, demonic tongue-lolling and singsongy slur, his "agent of chaos" strikes me as a boringly busy performance. Then again, it's scarcely surprising that a film with lines like "the only morality in a cruel world is chance" would be given instant masterpiece status these days. It's been said that Nolan's film is this year's No Country for Old Men, and indeed it is: Dour, numbing, empty, and humping its one note of negativism over and over until people intone it like the Holy Writ. The Dark Knight is not "a portrait of our times," but the fact that so many supposed adults keep squandering precious ink over elaborate exaltations of its relevance is a portrait of our times.
http://www.cinepassion.org/Archives/DarkKnight.htmlCiter:
Holy Impersonal Blockbuster! Batman Begins, but Miyazaki Wins
By Fernando F. Croce
Another week, another "edgy" filmmaker falls in bed with Hollywood hackdom. Just a bit ago it was Doug Liman molding the Pitt-Jolie tabloid item into Mr. and Mrs. Smith, now it's Christopher Nolan scrambling to jolt the Batman juggernaut back to life, though his joyless opus, Batman Begins, purports to be a fresh start. Really not a bad idea, considering that the camp-glitter bacchanalias the series had dissolved into in Joel Schumacher's hands was making the original Adam West '60s TV series look like a Bressonian tract by comparison. So, no batsuit nipples for Nolan and Co. -- it's back to the grim roots of creator Bob Kane, or perhaps Frank Miller's Batman: Year Zero graphic novel, with no noir trope left unturned for the gloomy reinvention of the Dark Knight. Or maybe Nolan and his co-screenwriter, David Blade Goyer, got paid by portentous utterance of the word "fear" -- thus, "to conquer fear you must become fear," "we have nothing to fear but fear itself," and "that is power... the power of fear." Fear of a black bat? A childhood dip into a bat-infested well plays "Rosebud" to this interpretation of Gothan City's big brooder, but since this is the "serious" retelling, there's more traumatic baggage down the chute, more than enough to justify Christian Bale's dourness as the titular Caped One.
Actually, the avenger-persona doesn't make an appearance until over one hour into the film, after a properly Jedi training in Asiatic icy expanses with, naturally, Liam Neeson. Young Bruce Wayne (Bale), blaming himself for his parents' alley mugging-cum-shooting, is shanghaied from a Chinese penitentiary by Ducard (Neeson) to be inducted into the "League of Shadows," a vigilante ninja organization lorded over by Ra's Al Ghul (Ken Watanabe). The Batman psyche is pieced together with heavy intonations ("You have learned to bury your guilt with anger," etc.) just as the Batman regalia is pieced together from ominous detailing (the pointy mask ears from an operatic tenor, the cape from his slain father's tux jacket), just in time for the trip back to Gotham to mop up the overflowing bad-guy residue. Despite the abundance of rotters, including Tom Wilkinson's Mafia capo, Rutger Hauer's ruthless CEO and Cillian Murphy's smart-parts Scarecrow, the picture remains all about the guy in the cowl, and Nolan is nothing if not self-conscious of his hero's iconography: "As a symbol, I can be incorruptible," Wayne mutters to butler Alfred (Michael Caine). Caine and Morgan Freeman (doing Q-business by supplying assorted bat-gadgetry) fill in required great-actor-doing-blockbuster-slumming space, dabbing in humanity when the director isn't looking.
Humanity, incidentally, is not one of Nolan's interests, pushed to the back seat by the techno-geek cleverness of Memento (a Film of My Generation that I never liked, like The Usual Suspects and Rushmore) and Insomnia. In Batman Begins, the tricks have deserted the director to leave only big-budget machinery tracks, fragmented smears of action scenes, Spider Man-redux romantic tepidness (former-actress-turned-Tom-Cruise-squeeze Katie Holmes plays Wayne's childhood sweetheart, now an idealistic DA getting in the villains' hair). For such a supposedly "dark" incarnation, new Batman is, underneath all that tortured gruffness, clean as a whistle, as befits the latest heir in a dynasty of benevolent billionaires who, God forbid, have absolutely nothing to do with the rampant social injustice polluting Gotham. (Papa Wayne even built a subway for the "less fortunate," and, if the family's moral fiber is still in question, we're told the previous generations helped escaped slaves.) Tim Burton's earlier versions displayed not only the filmmaker's pop-surrealist eye, but also the freaky links between hero and villain, while showing how an individualized talent can swim the blockbuster waters and not drown. Batman Begins, doom and digitalized maggots and all, is no less vanilla than Schumacher's Vegas circuses, though much more pretentious.
http://www.cinepassion.org/Archives/BatmanBegins.html
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, il me semblait que le sarcasme et les remarques pince-sans-rire étaient choses fréquentes. Je me souviens encore de la réplique de Greyhunter « après, les goûts, ça se discute, mais toi, t'as des goûts de merde » à mes commentaires sur Battlestar Galactica, qui m'avait bien fait sourire (la réplique, pas la série).
