The X-Files: I Want to Believe

I am an X-Phile. I watch reruns on TNT and the Sci-Fi channel (until they start showing the Doggett episodes then I find something else to watch for a couple of weeks). I have my favorite episodes and I have seen all of them repeatedly.

Chris Carter has blessed people like me with reopening the X-Files and offering Mulder a pardon for his alleged crimes. When I heard there was going to be a new X-Files movie this summer I asked why, then vowed to see it opening weekend. In the months between hearing about the film and today, I started questioning whether or not I should see it. The thing is that sometimes these things come out to a great deal of hype from the media and high expectations from the fans and they bomb. The numbers don't show it because the die hard fans are going to see it come hell or high water but they leave disappointed. I didn't want that.

I reasoned that Chris Carter is in charge and David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson obviously approved of the script so it couldn't be all bad. So, after much debate, I decided that I would go.

I say that I have my favorite X-Files episodes. Very few, if any of them are centered around the core plot of the show; Mulder's quest to find his sister. UFO's and aliens, while interesting in concept, don't interest me much in fiction. But I was fully expecting to see this as the whole of this new movie and was not only surprised but a bit disappointed to be met with little more than the pilot of a "next generation" spin-off (P.S. Don't get all excited, I am only making a comparison - to my knowledge there is no scuttlebutt of a spin-off).

While my reviews rarely contain spoilers, I feel compelled to tell my readers that The X-Files: I Want to Believe doesn't even so much as mention aliens (unless you count Russian immigrants). Even in the brief discussions of Samantha, the word abduction is only used once. This is only important if your love of the show was centered around the alien conspiracy and you didn't like the ghost/mutant/demon/psycho-kinetics episodes. If you watched the show because you were interested/a believer in the paranormal, or just liked to find out what kind of predicament Mulder would get them into next, then the absence of UFO's is completely irrelevant.

And if you are as committed a fan as I was for several seasons (and still am, to the reruns), you will spend a great deal of the film waiting with bated breath for Walter Skinner. Let me say this, as I teeter on the edge of spoiler.... His appearance is late but significant and I fully expected the theater to erupt in applause (to my chagrin, I was apparently the only bonafide, card-carrying geek in the room because I was the only geek who actually applauded).

The agents are being led through their case by a self-proclaimed psychic, Father Joe. Father Joe was an excommunicated priest with a soiled past (if you don't understand that, pick up a newspaper sometime). Father Joe was the subject of my debate in my own head - is that Billy Connolly? No, yes? No. I finally settled on yes and apparently the Scot went through some serious work to get ready for the role. Yes, the drawn, emaciated old man leading agents through the middle of a snowy nowhere, is Billy Connolly. And near as I can tell from my research (because I wanted to make sure before I wrote this) he's not ill. Of course, in true X-Files form, we never really find out if the old priest was truly psychic or a con, but I don't think true fans would expect to find out.

Basically, my recommendation is to go see it. It is fully worth the ticket price.

The Dark Knight

Let me begin by saying I really liked Nolan's Scarecrow. That statement plays an important part since he chose to being The Dark Knight by making Scarecrow a "grey" hat, as it were.

One of the opening scenes (about fifteen to twenty minutes into the 2 and a half hour picture) is of a group of mobsters being attacked by a group of Batman wannabes, led by Scarecrow. When the real Batman shows up and unmasks one of the bats-in-training and Dr. Krane, they both desperately profess that they were "only trying to help."

What? Scarecrow is ... trying to help Batman? I don't think I'm okay with that. And for purely female reasons, I'm also not okay with that being Cillian Murphy's only scene in the whole movie but his absence didn't take away from the rest of the movie.

The rest of the movie was... not as good as the first. When I heard Christian Bale, the American Psycho, was cast as Batman, I worried. Batman Begins put that worry to rest. The Dark Knight was not as good. If you are in it for explosions and the occasional one-liner (Lucius Fox asking Bruce Wayne's accountant if he really thought it was a good idea to blackmail a man who spends his nights beating bad guys to pulp), you are in for a hell of a ride. But if you are expecting a film to par with Nolan's previous outing, I fear you will be disappointed.

Morally, I have qualms critiquing Heath Ledger's performance, given the speculation that his inability to get out of character and leave The Joker's insanity behind was what led to the depression that eventually killed him. That is not to say I don't think he did a good job in the role, and if I didn't know it was him, I'd have never known it was him, but I have heard unofficial reviews that he made the show and I'm not sure I agree with that.

The truth is The Joker is supposed to be the scariest of all the Bat-villains because his only motivation is to, to quote Alfred (Michael Caine), "watch the world burn." Throughout the history of Batman, from the original Detective Comics to the 1960's TV show to the Dark Horse comics, The Joker has never been given a backstory to tell us why he is the way he is and he is (intentionally) the only villain without one. I don't think this version of The Joker was written to live up to that title. It comes down to a question of writing and considering Nolan's writing, Scarecrow is far more frightening than The Joker.

For the record, Nolan's treatment of Two-Face was a bigger disappointment but expounding on the whys of that would give away too much of the end of the film and I don't do that.

I guess the moral of the story here is to go see The Dark Knight but don't go because of the media hype (which is a bit over the top) or because the 14 screen theater in my humble hamlet has it playing on five screens to accommodate the anticipated audiences (which is also a bit over the top). Go because, in the dozen or so years I have been watching his performances, Christian Bale has never failed to impress and go because it's freaking Batman.

The Happening

M. Night Shyamalan is back with another creepy feature for our viewing pleasure. The Happening (starring Mark Whalberg and Zooey Deschanel) is Shyamalan's first R-rated feature which set this writer's horror-heart all a-twitter. Let's face it, The Sixth Sense, at only a PG-13 rating was pretty swell nightmare-fodder, what can the man give us with an R-rating?

The Happening was, at best, strange. At worst, not what I had hoped it would be. Perhaps, had it not come out of the pen of a writer who has earned such high expectations from me, I may have not been so critical but as it was the movie was odd. Basically, we learn in the first five minutes, as is Shyamalan's no-nonsense, get-down-to-business style, something is making people sign into the banana factory quick, fast and in a hurry. Two young ladies sit on a bench in Central Park, discussing a book, when suddenly Claire (the other girl was never properly given a title) starts behaving, well, strangely. Repeating herself, forgetting where she was in the book. A woman, somewhere off screen, screams, and Claire removes a chopstick from her hair and, just as calmly as if she were tying her shoelace, drives it through her carotid artery.

And things only get worse for the people of the American Northeast.

What disappointed me most about this film was not what was happening *ahem* but the rationing of script time. A significant amount of screen time was given to the various methods of suicide people elected and there was definitely a great deal of discussion about the science and mechanics of what was *ahem* happening but scientific and mechanical dialog do not horror film make. The happening of The Happening was not given sufficient attention to make me worry about it. I believed, when it was all over, that it could happen, scientifically speaking.

Perhaps the problem was not that there was insufficient attention given. Perhaps all the science and mumbo-jumbo sterilized it. Whatever the case, I say, wait until it comes out on video and rent it. I suggest spending your $15 after popcorn and a beverage on something worth of the 20 foot screen and super-dooper sound system. The Hulk or Hancock, perhaps. But if you are a Shyamalan fan, it is worth the rental fee.