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Lately I’ve seen a few movies about which I’m enough in line with the mass critical consensus that I feel reviewing them would be redundant, but about which I have one or two thoughts I’d like to air.

F’r instance:

• I agree that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is faithful to Adams’ text and very pretty to look at, but disappointingly unfunny aside from a few sight gags. But I feel more should be made about how uncannily perfect the casting of Stephen Fry and The Office’s Tim RobbinsFreeman (thanks for the catch, Flasshe) is for fans of Peter Jones and Simon Jones’ performances in the BBC Radio version, and how well Mos Def does with the part of Ford Prefect. Likewise, plenty of folks have remarked on how much Adams’ titular guide resembles palmtop computers and e-book readers, but I’ve wanted to hear more assertions that the wikipedia is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — an enormous repository of wide-ranging knowledge maintained by individual contributors, and which can be kept more up-to-date than is possible with traditional publishing models. (If you think the wikipedia is as valuable as I do, this might be a good time to financially support it.) Come to think of it, there’s some Google Maps in the guide, too.
• Batman Begins may be the best of the recent (Burton/Schumaker) batflicks, but that’s faint praise. In the others I saw (I missed 1997’s Batman & Robin), the batdude was consistently upstaged by his villains, so which was best was a question of whether I preferred Nicholson’s ticky, overdriven Joker or the one-two sleazy/campy punch of Pfeiffer and DeVito as Catwoman and the Penguin. Batman Begins is the first to explore Bruce Wayne’s own insanity and thereby make him more than a dour foil for his colorful counterparts. It also has a scene in which Batman is seen from the point of view of an increasingly disoriented and terrified gang of criminal unfortunates that’s probably the best single sequence from any live action superhero movie I’ve watched. Oh, and Michael Caine is just about as good as Katie Holmes is bad, with equally terrible lines.
• Watching Errol Morris’s documentaries has made me think about the nature of documentary film-making in general, because he employs some very interesting and slippery techniques to enliven talking head interviews. I thought I had a pair of insights into two different approaches used by Mr. Death and The Fog of War, but now I’m not so sure.

  Mr. Death has lengthy interviews with Fred A. Leuchter. If that name isn’t familiar, I don’t want to spoil the surprises of this compelling and disturbing biography, but I think it’s fair to suggest that the viewer may come to believe that Leuchter’s worldview has some logical blind spots. Mr. Death employs a device of cutting to a black screen while Leuchter’s voice continues over, and I thought that was might symbolize Leuchter’s metaphorical blindness.

  The Fog of War centers around a conversation with Robert McNamara, a man who was frequently accused of saying one thing and doing another, and who may (or may not) have faithfully implemented public policies with which he privately disagreed. The Fog of War frequently uses jump cuts while McNamara is apparently in mid-sentence, although it leaves in enough pauses, disfluencies*, and parenthetical asides to make it plain that not all of them were removed. This suggested to me that McNamara could plausibly deny having said many of the things he appears to say in the doucmentary, since his utterances could have been resequenced, taken out of context, or had their meaning altered (by editing out phrases like “but that was false”). Given McNamara’s reputation and history, that seemed a brilliant approach to take with such an (apparently) confessional and detailed interview.

  The catch is that we’ve lately been watching the DVDs of Morris’s First Person interview series, which are similarly thought-provoking and fascinating (and sometimes nightmarish). They also use both cuts to black screen and mid-speech jump cuts, so maybe I’m totally off-base in reading meaning into those editing styles. Then again, maybe not: for example, Gretchen Worden, the late director of the Mütter Museum, is shot from odd angles and frequently framed with her face partially offscreen, which encourages the viewer to think of the dichotomy between people and body parts, which is certainly germane to the interview.

  Incidentally, Morris didn’t edit any of this work, so even if I’m right, I’m not sure who deserves credit. Mr. Death was edited by Karen Schmeer; she, Doug Abel and Chyld King were credited on The Fog of War; and all three worked (with additional editors) on First Person. So sayeth IMDB, at any rate.

* “disfluency” is the $4.99 word for “um,” “er,” and the like. I’m delighted to, uh, learn it, and so I’m going to use it as much as, um, possible. Here’s an article about disfluencies that I enjoyed.

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