World reviews “The Dark Knight,” saying it’s top-notch and violent, a comic book dressed up as a crime novel.

Matthew Battles suggests the Pixar movie closely follows a century-old Forster story called, “The Machine Stops.”

Case in point.

Not that DC Comics, now a part of Warner Brothers, does not have interesting properties. It just that their great heroes of old aren’t as appealing as those from Marvel’s minds. Sure, Batman is the best one, and Superman has carved his niche, but Aquaman? News is there’s a Wonder Woman movie in the works, and people are developing storylines for Flash and Shazam.

But my point from the title is that people identify more with regular guys thrust into extraordinary circumstances than they do with gods and aliens defending the world from other gods and aliens.

I picked up a couple DVDs of old silent movies this weekend, yielding me a total of five Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. films to get acquainted with. I started with The Mark of Zorro, the 1920 film in which Fairbanks established himself as Hollywood’s definitive action star. It was also the first Zorro movie ever made. Fairbanks picked out the obscure hero of a single pulp magazine story and turned him into an icon, to his own and the author’s great profit.

(Note to Hollywood: My books are still available. Better move now.)

Silent movies have to be taken on their own terms. Naturalism wasn’t what they were about. They were almost a form of interpretive dance, in which the actors used their faces, their eyes and their whole bodies to convey their “lines,” only sparsely supplemented by those black dialogue cards. The great D. W. Griffith did a lot of pioneering work using the camera to assist in his storytelling, but little of that kind of artistry is apparent in this film. Basically they set the camera in one spot and shot the scene in front of it.

Modern treatments of Zorro fall prey to Hollywood’s deep-seated need to be relevant and significant. Fairbanks had no such pretensions. He picked the vehicle because it offered lots of scope for the gymnastics at which he excelled, and that’s how he used it. There’s talk of “justice” and “oppression” (Zorro is described, among other things, as a defender of the “natives,” something I haven’t seen emphasized in the more recent adaptations, though I missed the second Banderas film), but that’s set dressing. It’s really a movie about a really agile guy running rings around the plodding villains, and laughing at them while he does it. It’s one notch of seriousness from being a full-fledged comedy.

And it’s a lot of fun, taken on its own terms. Continue reading The Mark of Zorro →

Greybeard sends a link to a post on “what church leaders can learn from literature.” He says he has read only Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I have not read and I would say is not high on my list except I don’t have an actual list, so I can’t quite judge this title’s placement on it. I would like to read it some day. Maybe once I become rich and famous.

I have read Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev. I read it for a modern literature class in college and had to give a type of oral report on it even though I hadn’t gotten beyond 100 pages. But in those pages, Asher Lev grabbed me. It’s a thickly tensioned story of a family that feels out of place in the world and a gifted boy who feels out of place in his family. I’d like to read it again before getting around to Dorian Gray. I mean, I like Oscar Wilde. I have enjoyed my frequent experience with The Importance of Being Earnest. But I want to read more of Chaim Potok. One is flash, the other heat.

Many more reading recommendations follow in the comments on that post.