The Dark Knight

[cron]

i apologize for talking very briefly about the movie in question and wasting everybody's time but this is what i felt after seeing it.

first of all, i think this movie was tailormade for people like modage and me, who've been into batman for as long as they can remember and never worried about the nerdiness of it all , as some cynics disrespectfuly refer to a harmless admiration, a devotion even, to a work of fiction. i hope the bitching about superheroes being taken seriously, or superheroes stories that take themselves seriously, goes away.  that's as unfair as the idiot who's always there to remind us that a game is just a game, or movies are just movies, or a book is just a book, and a long et cetera. it's stuff nobody wants to hear.
i'm angry, because i know there's some people out there who were salivating for the moment this movie ended in order to imediately talk bad about it. why bother seeing it. and they ruin the experience a little. it's not something that happens just for this movie. it's an unhealthy obsession with wanting everything to be obscure and cryptic. i've had it with this. this movie is a monster, it is original and daring. it costed 100 million dollars and millions of people went to see it this weekend and many will see it on the weeks to come. i hope everyone in the world sees this, not because i thinks its message is so important that it will forever transform the  corrupted values of mankind and people will be enlightened. it is because there's no point of enjoying this movie if you don't have somebody to share the excitement with.
as i advance writing this, the more ideas come about the point i want to make, but i'll stop to be polite and say this: this movie works for me as a bastion against nocive snobism that's not helping a part of the cultural sphere in which we move, and then transforms into uglier stuff, like perverse social interaction.

[Fernando]

cron, you are the fucking man.


This was uber fantastic and I need to ask demand to all of you the following:

Do yourself a favor and watch this on IMAX asap! Even if you need to drive for an hour to see it or even more, you have to see this on IMAX.

Heath was simply amazing, what else is to say about his performance than that he set the bar too high so it's almost impossible for anyone else to step into his shoes.

I wonder if GT liked it, for the ppl that didn't I really feel bad for ya.

[sickfins]

seeing the gasoline travel vertically during that scene made me consider a visual echo from teddy's death scene in memento

[modage]

spoilers
i was so sucked into the joker as the villain of the film, and then they just brushed him aside...
and we didn't get enough resolution with the joker. i'd of loved it if the film ended with a shot of him in a padded cell. looking happy.

my 2nd viewing i thought about this too about 2/3rds of the way through.  i thought: wouldn't it be great if there was a shot of Joker in Arkham during the final minutes, but when that point in the film came I realized it wouldn't have fit.  the film was about the fall of Harvey Dent more than it was about the Joker's master plan. 

[pete]

Hey, all this talk about batman this and batman that, I don't think Batman is what this world needs you know?  I think we need a different kind of superhero...like...Dog Woman.

[cine]

uh, but what kind of superhero is Dog Woman?

[pete]

"what kind"?  I'll tell you what kind!

A bitchilante, that's what kind!

[cine]

end of thread.

[cron]

you guys staged that!

[Kal]

I think pete was dreaming about a dog woman, then came up with the term 'bitchilante', and then figured out a way to throw it in here... a little sad but at least he is trying... give him a break!!!

[squints]

Can we start speculating as to which villain will be in the third? I'd say their best bet would be Catwoman. The Riddler is too similar to the joker. Mr. Freeze wouldn't work. Poison Ivy is lame. I say Catwoman.

or dog woman? 

[Fernando]

Can we start speculating as to which villain will be in the third? I'd say their best bet would be Catwoman. The Riddler is too similar to the joker. Mr. Freeze wouldn't work. Poison Ivy is lame. I say Catwoman.
or dog woman? 

SPOILERS


Word on the street is that Harvey might not be death (well its one theory), because while we see him laying down there, he easily could only be unconscious, and yes there was a funeral but Gordon also staged his death, so maybe Gordon arranged that so they try to 'cure' Harvey at some mad house.

[squints]

Spoiltown:

I assumed Dent wasn't dead. I'm thinking Catwoman because Rachael's gone and Wayne needs a new love in his life. A doomed love full of treachery and deceit! But I guess Batman Returns already kind of covered this.

[Gold Trumpet]

Spoilers


Batman is a childhood treasure to me. He's the only super hero I ever truly bought into and followed with the utmost interest as I got older. Everything started with Burton's Batman and continued on with Batman: The Animated Series. I still watch those cartoons and also the Burton original. When I came to watch Batman Begins I was suspicious about a lot of the technical details, but I still enjoyed the film on a basic level because it was a rendering of Batman that did remind me of why I loved the character. The film rationalized a lot of technical details, but was wonderfully inventive with adding the Raz Ah Gaul plotline to describe his beginnings, among other things.

The sadness for me is that The Dark Knight is neither very good technically nor does it even remind me of my basic intrinsic interest in the character of Batman. Nolan in his reimagination has drained the character of all his essential qualities. He has made Batman and the series to be dramatic foil for something more, but in his idea to transcend the super hero genre I believe he has made a film that isn't even technically a Batman film.

My problems begin with something everybody is complimenting. People love that the tone and structure of the film has more to do with a crime drama than it does a super hero film. The first thing I noticed about the film was that Nolan wanted to take on a complicated plot with detailed analysis of the mob scene in Gotham City. The first half of the film is an exploration into how the city is taking on new methods to combat the mafia. The film could be argued as inducting itself into social analysis because it does look at multiple levels of crime and bureacy within the city.

I believe the film is interested in all these details, but none of the interest is really about a social analysis of a fictional city. The main interest of mafia focus is to show a system of order within the criminal world so the entrance of the Joker becomes that more embrasive because he totally disregards the rules, but the film just dedicates too much time and energy to what should have been just a story in the background or a subplot at best. The major problem is that the first half of the film is about something that is mainly meant to get the audience to understand that the Joker is a threat to order on all levels of life. A very simple message to the audience that could have been illustrated much easier and in a much simpler way. It really had nothing to do with social interest. That's absurd.

The tone reminded of Heat in that it was a straight laced story of professional killers and heroes acting professional, but as much that talk intrigues the audiences, it has no dramatic core or deeper meaning to it. The first half of the Dark Knight is much more interesting because of the plot ideas it has to imagine Batman in China going after a businessman in James Bond fashion. The fact that the film was able to do that without great question of the storyline is the most successful thing about it, but that has nothing to do with who Batman is or what he is about. It has everything to do with the wheels of a great plot idea turning. Heat is a fascinating movie, but it is a movie of an operatic movie style meant to allure the audience instead of getting them to sympathize with deeper moral questions.

The main problem in the film has to do with Batman. Once the film begins we are already knee deep in the storyline described above. Batman is the man who moves his way through out the puzzle to catch the mobsters and does so with cool confidence. We're interested because when we question his intelligence we see he was already a step ahead, but Batman is first served up to us as just a know it all.

The transition to his darker and more personal side becomes ridiculous. His character is frustrated with Joker's tactics because it leaves him immobile and unsure about how to react so we begin to notice Batman randomly walking into public situations and beating everyone up. When he does this we don't see him dealing with his problem to need to control everything, but as him just being Batman and intimidating the bad guys. The tone of these attacks replicate the cool crime drama tone only. It is further down the story that characters like Alfred and Lucious Fox began to tell Batman and the audience of what his problem really is. Lucious Fox even reveals things Batman has done to signify his deep character conflicts that the audience had no chance to be aware of. Their words are meant to be the dramatic ingrediants for us when the film should have made us aware of Batman's control issues beforehand. It should have laced the actions and happenings of Batman with their dramatic significance before they happened.

Then there is the question of his presence and tone. In Burton's original Batman did little actual fighting. Numerous scenes in the movie were about his presence and the fear he put into characters. The fights after saving Vicky Vale involve him doing stuff to bad guys, but it was minimal. The only other major fights were at the end on the roof top with the Joker's main men. The film was awesome to strike a tone with him that he was a character in the shadows and represented an idea. Batman Begins had the storyline to say he was an idea to crime figures, but Dark Knight shows him as just a cool operator of punishing people. When he enters an impossible situation, he does it with little suave and enters just from dark corners. The meat of the scenes then transition into him engaging in complicated martial arts and beating up everyone. I thought Batman Begins had a little too much of this because it smacks of Jason Bourne envy, but I felt the movie kept it to a decent minimum. I felt like Dark Knight abandonded the original tone of Batman entirely and purely focused on his fighting capabilities. In two seconds flat he would enter an impossible situation and spend three minutes beating up everyone. Little tone of Batman with how much the focus was on his physical attributes.

People may believe it showed this because Batman was in doubt about himself, but the tone of most of the fights match up with the tone of first half of the film: that Batman and Bruce Wayne are second guessed by others but rise to show they are smarter than everyone else. To show Batman was in true doubt or still learning would show him eventually lose in some of these impossible fighting situations, but he never does. His character has as much intricacy as an old Steven Segal character. Segal's characters would beat everyone up and he was meant to be portrayed as someone filled with emotional problems, but it always showed it with him just randomly beating up people only. The bulk of Batman's characterization is through this way as well. Sure, other characters and plot lines also come up to try to define his problems, but they come up much later in the film. Wayne's relationship with Rachel is only given a few scenes while Fox and Alfred spell out way too much about Wayne's problems. If you want to measure up the first half of the film for emotional inspection than a lot of it just resembles a bad Segeal movie.

Then there is the Joker. His character is by far the most interesting part of the film, but Nolan adds an old bad technique in which to portray him. Nolan always has his appearances coinside with elaborate criminal plots. It reminds me of Memento when the characterization of the characters were wrapped in an elaborate plot. Burton's original had Joker as a better presence. He was able to dominate more scenes and the audience was able to make sense of who he was from his actions. In Nolan's version we make sense of him from his complicated crime ideas. There are few times when Nolan goes to the character to just see him interact. Nolan realizes he needs to give the Joker some more meat so he allows him to make up lines about a troubled childhood, but the Joker doesn't need such an explanation. He just needs more time. The audience can believe some characters are just psychotic. I wish the film would have granted the Joker more physical time to interact with other characters and show how he was to develop himself. Instead we got a lot of talk about who he is from other characters and a lot of unnecessary explanation about his childhood. Nolan wanted to represent the Joker as a force, but explaining him that way didn't help.

Then there is Heath Ledger's performance. The good is that Ledger was able to imagine the Joker to be this way. I couldn't have pictured such a Joker but Ledger does it and pushes it to the extreme that was necessary. I just don't believe the creation was that great because Ledger focuses a lot of his role on make uo, vocal tone and physical gestures. It seems like he created a character that will be very easy for anyone else to mimic or copy. At least with Nicholson's performance you have Nicholson using a lot of his personality to will the character. No one else could do the role the way he did it. There is good in keeping a lot of your essential personality part of a role because it allows you to staple that role. It allows you to use essentials as an actor no one else can copy. All actors know how to mimic physical gestures and can do voice copies so the sad note about Ledger's performance is that had so little to do with Ledger himself. He truly concealed himself but that meant making a role I believe was a little too simplistic.

Then there is Harvey Dent and how he becomes Two Face. It's sad that a major character like this is only served up to come into existence and then immediately die. Some believe his character will live on, but I can't assume that will happen. What Two Face rising to and immediately dying means that the film was too casual and happy with the dramatic endings. In one scene you have Rachel die in a tragic fashion. That scene had the weight and meat to end a film. She was a major character and her death should have begun a new chapter for everyone involved. It did for Two Face but his character was immediately wiped out. That's ridiculous. You don't kill off a character of such importance so quickly especially when he was created out of one of the most important dramatic sequences for the entire movie. The film tries to add on meaning to his death by explaining how Batman became the Dark Knight from it, but that's rubbish. The final 20 minutes of the film had more dramatic happenings and changes than the rest of the whole film. The piling on of dramatic moments just reminded me of Spiderman 3. It tried to write off answers for every character when it could have let one situation define the movie and just explore the new subjects more in the next film, but everything had to be answered, whether it needed to or not. The film had too many endings to be legitimate.


People applaud Nolan for doing Batman anew, but I believe in the process he lost of a lot essential qualities about Batman that I loved. I believe this film was more a crime drama than it was a Batman film. One critic said it was a crime drama that just happened to have Batman in it. I concur.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

Hey, all this talk about batman this and batman that, I don't think Batman is what this world needs you know?  I think we need a different kind of superhero...like...Dog Woman.

You're a good guy... you Pete, you're a good guy.