Rex Baxter Dot Com

Dear Cabinet Ghost,

“The Dark Knight” is a parable for the struggle between upright elected law enforcers versus their mercenary, crudely more efficient counterparts: the Pinkertons. Its name refers to a character who skulks around a futuristic city filled with the tallest buildings conceivable. Referred to by criminals and allies alike as the Bat (due to his penchant for dressing as said flying skunk) or the Bat-man, we have here a classic example of the kind of man the Pinkerton Agency is wont to hire. Yes, he may be a maniac whose morals are questionable, but he is harshly effective in seeing his version of justice and the law upheld. Like the Pinkertons, we are given the impression that the Manbat never sleeps. Also like those notorious detectives-for-hire, there is no telling how for the Bat-man will go to realize his vision of justice and order.

But this is not the Bat-man’s story. This is the story of a district attorney named Harvey Dent. Indeed, the titular Manbat holds Harvey, the proverbial new sheriff in town, in high regards. Mr. Dent is the hope that this city of Gotham has been clamoring for. He is seen as a replacement for the ham-fisted noble carnage offered by the vigilante Bat. Dent makes a name for himself early by teaming up with the Manbat and police detective Jim Gordon (played deftly by Gary Oldman) to lock up 500 of Gotham’s criminals.

All the while, the city’s most dangerous criminal, a clown named simply the Joker, is hatching a scheme to aid the city’s mob bosses by eliminating Dent’s most powerful weapon, the Manbat. This Joker is a criminal more insane than a badger marooned on an island of gourds (as the saying goes).

Now, I have a fond regard for clowns. There is nothing funnier to me than an orange man riding a common cat around a circus ring while his nose runs grape jam and his hat is on fire (incidentally, that young clown grew up to be President Hayes). But this Joker simply will not do. Clowns are supposed to be sources of mirth and chestnuts, not knife-borne threats to ladies’ mouths. The evil machinations of this green-haired creep were enough to send shivers down one’s spine. I have not so adamantly wished for a man’s demise since I saw some wretched sailor fighting a defenseless ram last week. He is most dangerous because he does not operate for money or material gain. He simply wants chaos, and he is willing to test Harvey Dent’s (and Man-bat’s) character to conjure discord.

It would have been easy to simply stuff actors into tights and pancake them with makeup and see how many times they can foil each other. Actually, there are quite a few such thrilling tete-a-tetes in this film. But it also goes much deeper. It asks us whether it is possible to remain good and true in a world prone to chaos and the worst in each of us. I found myself asking what my stance was on the difference between justice and revenge. In the end, is a hero a man defending an unwritten code of honor, or simply the servant who has saved the most lives? Is it enough for a Pinkerton to protect the property of the men who hired him, or is he required to answer also to a yet higher power? If I see a wino falling down a flight of stairs, do I laugh and let him slide as the law demands, or do I reach out and save the drunkard? These are the questions posed by the Joker and pondered by all else between the explosions and heavy punches.

I do wish the story had focused more on the Bat-man than on the rise and ultimate fall of the cocksure district attorney. Much ado was made about the scar-faced denizens of this berg (the worst case being that of the terribly maimed Maggie Gyllenhaal) when it seems that Batman alone could be the driving force for 6 or even 7 movies of his own. In the end, this movie thrilled me. It flew along at an incredible pace, twisted frequently like a freak’s spine, and left me demanding to know more about the complex (if not incredibly realistic) characters.

This movie passes muster.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rex Baxter

July 20, 1892

Dear Cabinet Ghost,

I sat back from the enthrallment of “Punch-Drunk Love” with the same appreciation for life that accompanies waking from a fever dream. Most of the movies I have seen were created with the intention of conjuring a feeling of triumph in their hypnotized viewers. This film also inspires a feeling, but it is one of frustration. This movie nags. It jabs the ear drums like a bee tied to a swab. It progresses without logic toward an end where your hero must, he simply must, have his revenge, and then delivers in a subtle victory that selfishly defies expectations. Far from triumphant, this movie still had enough power to make me feel the harried malaise experienced by Barry Egan (played by Adam Sandler). In this way, “Punch-Drunk Love” has succeeded where other films dare not even tread.

On the surface, the story of the film doesn’t add up to much. A man hesitantly falls in love with his sister’s coworker. He scams his way to the Kingdom of Hawaii by hoodwinking a pudding magnate. He gets into some trouble with a criminal genius who uses a sexy telephone scheme to relieve men of the finances. He finds a small piano. He never changes out of his suit. All told, this could be anyone’s humdrum life.

But the engine of all this action is Sandler’s Egan, a bundle of nerves more raw than a salad in Christ’s day. He has trouble understanding his own reactions to the million little things that go wrong for him. When big problems begin amassing for him, it is all he can do to keep from existing in a constant berserk rage. The movie shows us all the pain in Barry Egan and allows us the privilege of being the only observer who truly understands the difficulties with which he wrestles.

Then when he confronts the main villain we are denied the macho climax we expected, which gave me a taste of the denied visceral release that haunts our hero. It is a choice that further humanizes a protagonist who already twitches with some of the more shameful parts of humanity that seethes in all of us.

There are days when the plaintive crying and needy demands of my patients bring me to an emotional state where it would be easy for me to fling children from high windows and stab and stab these patients’ torsos until only a fleshy web of ligaments remained. Being a civilized man of decorum, of course, means that I cannot act upon these valid impulses. But there is seemingly no man who has not been pushed around by the seemingly harmless gadflies of existence until something simply needs to be smashed and ruined. There is a little bit of Barry Egan in anyone who has ever simply been fed up.

Emily Watson is delicate and yet unflappable in this movie. She takes Barry’s eccentricities in stride, giving the feeling that she can ably handle the chaos he creates, even if she can never truly understand it. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s gruff extortionist is all bombast and unearned yet honored high status, making his eventual return to normal just as damning as a defeat of complete destruction would have been. Adam Sandler is a revelation is this role. The quake in his voice betrays the tectonic plates of angry bile shifting around beneath his fragile demeanor. No one on screen, Barry included, has a clue where the rage comes from. Our being able to count the pieces of this put-upon puzzle is due entirely to Sandler’s fright and potent hostility. Something tells me Adam Sandler could conquer any role he is given, where lesser actors would choose to simply pick basically one character and play it over and over again.

This movie passes muster.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rex Baxter

July 13, 1892

Punch-Drunk Love (Single Disc Edition)

• Actors: Adam Sandler, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Luis Guzmán
• Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
• Rating:
• DVD Release Date: December 2, 2003
• Run Time: 95 minutes

Dear Cabinet Ghost,

It is with rapt pleasure and jittering excitement that I report to you that I have escaped from my pantry. With new eyes I gaze upon my study, my parlor, my mailman, my cellar. It was but months ago that I was taking inventory of my kitchen’s stock (I had next to nothing) when the pantry door was blown shut and was rendered quite stuck. I wrote you letters during this months-long misadventure, dear Ghost. Needless to say I have long since used those letters to bury my waste in the pantry’s northwest corner. I haven’t the temerity to mail them.

Imagine my wry familiarity with the fare you have manifested for me this time. After I’d checked in with my patients and paid the cheese man my cheddar arrears, I sat down for a viewing of the film “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks. Where Tom Hanks had to reinvent fire-building, I had to reinvent flossing (I had a jar of moths’ filaments leftover from Christmas). Where Tom Hanks had to slice coconuts with an ice skate, I had to fend off moles with a husked ham cob. Where Tom Hanks had to deal twice with the wrenching loss of his one true love, I …

Well, regardless, I was stuck in the pantry.

“Cast Away” is about a man ruled by the clock. Ever since the railroad timetables were standardized, the world has ticked along at an inexorable pace that can only be ignored by the foolhardy or the idiots (who anyway are prohibited from owning timepieces). Chuck Noland is so dominated by his sense of time and work ethic that even Christmas dinner with his oft-Southern girlfriend’s family can stand in the way of his schedule. After he tells his fair dame that he’ll “be right back” he is whisked off onto a flying contraption on a doomed trajectory.

What follows is the best part of the movie. Do not get me wrong, I enjoy a saccharin display of quaint family charm and true love lost, but there is just something enthralling about watching a marooned modern man do menial things on an island. I could have used an additional hour of watching Mr. Noland learning the rules of this beautiful purgatory.

I could imagine this movie ending with a swell of strings and a chill up my spine, or with a silent sunset and a last exhale. The movie’s actual ending is somewhere in between, and it was not up to the daunting task of living up to its spectacular second act. In the end, the gloss of this film which makes it the best stranded-on-an-island vision imaginable proves too jarring when applied to the hotel rooms and rainy garages of civilization.

Tom Hanks is a miracle in this movie. He conveys more harried strength in a single glimpse than any of today’s actors can express in a monologue screamed over the heckling masses. Perhaps my zeal can be attributed to cabin fever following my imprisonment in my own home (thanks go to my maid for returning from her vacation to Barbados, albeit 2 weeks late). Save for the end and some of the beginning, I loved “Cast Away!” Bravo!

This movie passes muster.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rex Baxter

July 6, 1892

Cast Away (Widescreen Edition)

• Actors: Tom Hanks, Helen Hunt
• Directors: Robert Zemeckis
• Rating:
• DVD Release Date: March 5, 2002
• Run Time: 143 minutes

Dear Cabinet Ghost,

I should very much like to know who invited the traveling faire to pass through town. Have these festival organizers no decorum? They must, they simply must, know that I am hopelessly enthusiastic about gambling my savings away at carnival games. Why, this very weekend, I played the game of Skipping Pins until my billfold was quite flat in shape. I can fold the thing in quarters now! I close my eyes to nap this hazy afternoon and behind my eyelids I can still see the sinewy neck of the proprietor of this gaming stand and the way his weathered skin drew taut when he turned his head or grinned.

This gives me pause. Is my situation not unlike the situation endured by the officers aboard the submersible USS Alabama in the film “Crimson Tide”? The movie sees a magical submarine boat populated by American naval officers. If the operations and procedures of war were not taxing enough as it is upon its soldiers, imagine the effect of all these politics occurring within a steel tube that offers no point of escape! Every square inch is in high demand. All the feats of technical savvy and physical brawn must be made in a space essentially the size of a hallway filled with 300 men. When the sailors are ordered to fire the world’s most powerful artillery upon their Russian enemy, they begrudgingly accept their yoke. A second communication is cut off halfway during its transmission. It may be an order to stand down and avoid mutually assured destruction, but there is just no way to know.

Today I picture myself in the role of Lt. Commander Hunter (Denzel Washington) and my criminally amiable foe as Capt. Ramsay (Gene Hackman). Do not the both of us feel that we are in the right? I should say that we do! There I stood with gristly puck in hand, measuring what would have to be my final chance to win a stuffed toy fern, knowing with all my being that I was a hero on a campaign of destiny. But certainly this games broker, whose name was Bors, must have seen in me his doom wrought in bone and unblemished flesh. It is all analogous to a standoff that would prevent cataclysmic war.

O Cabinet Ghost, what is the nature of evil? When Hunter balked at the prospect of decimating his Russo-Militaristic enemies with a rain of bombastic fire he was certain that his actions were for the good of all his fellow men. But what if his initial orders stood without his knowledge and he was simply securing the doom of his countrymen? Should we consider Hackman’s commander an evil man simply because he follows orders and exhibits the necessary rigor required for managing a warship that somehow operates beneath the waves?

Our emotions can sweep us away. Having heaved my ultimate puck and missed the mark I pleaded for a mulligan, but Bors was not having it. I said that I am a doctor and have saved many lives and deserve more chances that the common layman, which would have been a dashing argument had I not been gesticulating wildly enough to poke a young girl behind me in the eye with my thumb. I believe I apologized profusely enough to this girl, who had little business doddling around in my blind spot, to avoid the fate of hot caramel being dumped on my head by her mother. Her mother, to my barber’s chagrin, had a different perspective.

And there is the rub! No force of evil, whether it be Gene Hackman or Bors the carnie or this little girl’s mother who carries around hot caramel, walks through life intending evil intentions. It took “Crimson Tide” to remind me that even the most aggressively stanced opponent will believe that Providence and morality is on his side. Objectively, removed from the emotions of the combatants, this would make any victory in any situation an evil occasion. As Hunter says in the movie, “the enemy is war itself”.

This movie passes muster.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rex Baxter

April 6, 1892

Crimson Tide

• Actors: Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, George Dzundza, Viggo Mortensen
• Director: Tony Scott
• Rating:
• DVD Release Date: February 4, 1998
• Run Time: 116 minutes

Dear Cabinet Ghost,

The film I viewed today seems to have been drawn. That is, as a movie is normally a succession of photographs passing before the eyes so quickly that the images seem to be in motion, this film could have been a series of drawings. And what things these drawings can do! Today I watched a fat man hitting himself in the eye with a claw hammer, a baby exploring a magical worm-tunnel in her sandbox, a squirrel with a thousand eyes cavorting, and God manifesting himself as a shaft of light to induce a demented rant in an old man. All this in the first ten minutes of the movie!

The story concerns a comic buffoon ruining Lake Springfield by dumping a silo’s worth of pig droppings into it. The US government attempts to quarantine the befouled area by dropping a gigantic glass dome over the town, entombing its citizens. Homer escapes with his family, but they are torn by the man’s inability to set aside his own selfish and idiotic goals for the sake of his clan.

The movie is framed like a satire, but half the time I couldn’t understand what it was lampooning. It’s as if the creators spent years creating a complex mythical world populated by zany archetypes and made this movie as a representative glimpse. My complaint is that they assume any casual viewer would be able to recognize these characters.

Funny: “Bountiful penis. Amen.”
I don’t get it: “Spider-pig.”
Funny: Lisa’s automatic lifting platform going berserk.
I don’t get it: A Spaniard in a bee costume.
Funny: The completely idiot-proof barrier. “I simply can’t!”
I don’t get it: Marge washing one dish in a burning house.

There is so much mania that the five cumulative minutes devoted to sentimentality and plot do not pack much of a punch. I, being a confessed ninny, have been moved by more stories of hamsters belonging to diplomats (of course I refer to Sir C.E. Howard Vincent’s beloved pet Grover) than I was by this movie. I didn’t care that Homer’s family left. I didn’t care that Lisa had fallen in love. The whole affair was treated as if its events would have no effect on the future of this world. If every moment is packed to capacity with bits and gags, then how can we feel any gravity summoned by the pathos behind it all?

To be sure, the gags I understood were very good gags. I feel as if I just spent Thanksgiving with a hilarious uncle who speaks some foreign language. His anecdotes are beyond me, but his pratfalls are the world’s finest. I was tickled and frustrated over and over in quick succession, like a whore at an Irish chicken factory on Friday. Give me a movie that creates a world within itself before playing against its own parameters. As it is, this film seems like a swatch taken from a rich tapestry when, honestly, the tapestry itself would have been nice, too.

This movie does not pass muster.

Sincerely,

Dr. Rex Baxter

March 30, 1892