Two For The Price Of none

1. "Up For Grabs." Showing at one of the Twin Cities' truly independent theatres, the Parkway, this documentary is genuinely not for a wide, mass audience. But it is also about a lot more than it seems to be on the surface, and of interest to a lot of people who don't think they could care about a film dealing with this picture's nominal "topic".

What is that topic, you might ask? Baseball, he responded. Specifically, it's about the ball that Barry Bonds hit to get his record-setting, season ending 73rd home run several years back. Two different men both claimed to have caught it and therefore have the right to it, and they took each other to court, employing a small army of lawyers to fight a small war that nearly destroyed an unbelievable number of lives. And by the way, it's one of the funniest documentaries this side of the MOCumentaries of Christopher Guest.

What the movie is ultimately about is how the country has changed over the past decades, a former selfless, giving attitude gradually giving way to a greedy, "looking out for number one" philosophy. As illustrated by baseball, of course. Just watch the film of the 19-year-old who caught Roger Maris' record-setting home run in 1961 as he tells an interviewer he plans to return the ball to Maris, then is taken aback when maris tells him to keep the ball and make some money from it... contrasted to the "every man for himself" attitude of the case this film is about. Something has definitely changed about this nation in the past 45 years, and not for the better.

This doesn't mean that the movie is somber and downbeat. On the contrary, it's possibly the greatest example of satire you'll ever see that wasn't deliberately written as such. And you'll be shaking your head in stunned amazement when you're not laughing.

Every time a sports movie comes out somebody will say something about it "isn't really about (fill in the name of the sport)". "Up For Grabs" definitely IS about baseball, but it's also about so much more than that, that anyone missing out on it will be missing out on a film they'll prob654ably find highly entertaining on several levels. You should check it out 654if you can. (The Parkway is located at 48th Street and Chicago Avenue South in Minneapolis.)

2. "Batman Begins". For the first time in a theatrical film, the origins of Batman are shown, and the tone is darker by far than any of the previous films in the series. Is that enough to make "Batman Begins" a great film? No, not really. Is it enough to make it so superior to the previous films that it's still worth checking out, especially for the comics die-hards? Definitely.

Batman's primary villain here, Ras Al Ghul, was a magnificent figure in the original comics, a character of powerful nobility you had to admire and hate at the same time. As depicted in this film by Ken "Last Samurai" Watanabe, he's more of an afterthought, a character seemingly tamed down so that the villain won't outshine Batman himself the way the villains always have before. The second villain, the Scarecrow, is wonderfully played by Cillian Murphy of "28 Days Later", but doesn't show up until far too late in the movie. And even at 2 and a quarter hours, the film zips by too fast to pay as much attention to some of the significant events in Batman's life that it should.

AND YET... Christian Bale is undoubtedly the perfect actor for this role, his barely surpressed madness and fury deolishing all memories of George Clooney's and Val Kilmer's performances in the role (he's also better than Michael Keaton, but Keaton at least was OK in the part). Class acts Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Tom Wilkinson and Michael Caine as Alfred lend the film some welcome touches of dignity, and it's especially nice to see the character of Alfred rescued from the "You rang, sir?" cliches of the TV series and the previous films, and given a real depth. The atmosphere is every bit as brooding and the visuals (filmed in both Hong Kong and Chicago, among other places) are spectacular, easily the equal of anything in the Tim Burton films. Aznd like I said, the darker tone is very, very welcome... I happen to think that it's almost impossible to make a "Batman" movie that's too dark.

So yes, it's not perfect, and maybe even a little further from perfect than some of the critical raves it's received might lead you to believe. But I happen to be a long-time fan of the original comics who still very nearly gets ill whenever I even THINK about the TV show or the Joel Shumaker films... and this is one that I quite enjoyed. If there is sixth movie, I can only hope that Christopher Nolan writes and directs that one, too.