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While 15 million or so moviegoers are streaming into thousands of multiplex Bat-caves to catch The Dark Knight this weekend, a couple thousand or so are seeing The Exiles at the IFC Center in New York City. (The movie opens over the next few weeks in San Francisco, Santa Fe and Los Angeles.) The gap between Hollywood blockbusters and indie films has never been greater, in exposure, box office revenue and media attention. Yet for intrepid cinephiles, the rewards of Kent Mackenzie's long-lost film are savory, and well worth seeking...
There's a beautiful high-angle shot, early in The Dark Knight, that looks down on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in full Batman regalia as he perches atop a Gotham skyscraper, surveying the city he lives to protect, then leaping off and spreading his majestic bat wings to swoop down into the night. Bruce's trajectory is also the film's. It traces a descent into moral anarchy, and each of its major characters will hit bottom. Some will never recover, broken by the touch of evil or by finding it, like a fatal infection, in themselves...
...Eyewitnesses say that Dawyyat used the machine's backhoe to slam into cars and flip over two buses, and that he tore onto the sidewalk, crushing pedestrians. Bat El-Ganem, a bus passenger, told reporters that the bulldozer "rammed into the bus again and again. Two babies flew towards me; I was in shock. I don't know how I made it out alive. We flipped over until a wall stopped us." It is believed that the killer was headed toward the Machaneh Yehudah open market, teeming with shoppers at the noon hour...
Times weren't always so flush in Toontown. In 1997, "George Clooney killed comic-book movies," says Millar. Joel Schumacher's joyless Batman & Robin, in which Clooney legendarily donned a bat suit complete with rubber nipples, left fans feeling abused. Studios turned their attention to fantasy literature like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. But when Spider-Man bested two wizard movies and a Star Wars prequel in 2002 and X-2: X-Men United broke $200 million at the box office in 2003, hand-drawn heroes swung back into favor. The joke in Hollywood now is that...
...contrast, it took only a few hours to catch the killer in Kathryn Harrison's While They Slept (Random House; 290 pages). Early on the morning of April 27, 1984, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., then 18, beat his parents and his sister Becky to death with a baseball bat in their home in Oregon. He said afterward that he did it to save himself and his other sister Jody from an abusive domestic situation. He imagined that they would run away together. Jody called...