I really enjoyed the new Batman. Very brooding, very dark- but good nonetheless. Heath Ledger was very solid, the music was great, and I am finally to the point where the sound effects in theatres are too loud for me.
Twenty-Seven minutes of previews, which ended abruptly as I was stating to the person I was with “Just start the god damned movie” loud enough for her to hear over the sound of the commercials, so obviously everyone in the damned theater heard it. Bastards.
Mwangangi
only 27? Go see a premier in NY or SF…
Ninerdave
Yet you swear and rant all over this blog. Anonymous people on the Internet…anonymous people in a movie theater. Not much difference in my book.
At least you weren’t talking *during* the movie.
The Other Steve
The last year or two we’ve noticed in theatres that the previews come on and it’s suddenly way too loud. I’ve had to go ask them to turn it down several times.
I’m assuming the guy who controls the volume must be deaf or something.
JGabriel
I enjoyed it too.
But I do wonder what future generations will make of our penchant for fetishistically-costumed vigilantes.
I mean, I’m sure there’s fodder for a grad student essay on depictions of heroism from Achilles & Ulysses to Beowulf to King Arthur to Shakespeare to Charles Dickens to Cowboys to Batman.
I’m just rather perplexed as to what trend exactly is revealed here.
.
The Other Steve
We’re going to go see Batman tomorrow. The theatre across the street from us only charges $5 M-Th. $10 on weekends.
nightjar
Wondering WTF Bush was trying to say?
Incertus
Yeah, but The Watchmen trailer was worth it all.
Meanwhile, Italy decided to join the 20th century as far as womens’ rights are concerned.
Krista
Investigative reporting? I’d completely forgotten what that is.
Incertus
An essay? There’s a Masters thesis in there at least, if not a doctoral dissertation. My school offers a Masters track in sci-fi/fantasy, and some of our grad students are moving on to do PhD work in the field. Graphic novels are not uncommon on the reading lists.
Notorious P.A.T.
Twenty-Seven minutes of previews
You ever forget which flipping movie you’re there to see? I do.
Chuck Butcher
If she didn’t writhe in embarassment – you’re gold.
gaucho
This is the first time i’ve made a second post on the same topic on the same site (and probably my 5th post total.) But after talking it over with some people “Let me show you a magic trick…” has to be the Joker’s equivalent of eating “his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.”
gaucho
Excuse me. It’s: “How about a magic trick?”
gbear
Hey! You commercials get off my screen!
Ned Raggett
The magic trick line, indeed.
Big, BIG debate among friends of mine right now about the film’s general aesthetics and ‘message’ as such. It’s hit a nerve.
Big E
LOUDNESS = Blue Oyster Cult
LOUDNESS = Transformers movie
what? what? what?
Hawes
One of the previews I saw was for a Ridley Scott-Russel Crowe-Leonardo DiCaprio movie about what appears to be extra-legal warfare by something that approximates the CIA.
But what struck me was that – while TV has dealt well with the “post 9/11” world – movies have not. Dark Knight is the first movie to really expose where the American psyche is right now, without really taking sides.
chiggins
Saw it tonight. Really, really stunning. Transcends the rest of the franchise. As advertised, Ledger’s performance was masterful.
Watchmen trailer was fun, but was surprised to see a trailer for Blindness. I wouldn’t have thought Saramago would make good fuel for movies. Interested to see it translates.
Dan
“was surprised to see a trailer for Blindness. I wouldn’t have thought Saramago would make good fuel for movies. Interested to see it translates.”
Saw a screening of it a couple of months ago. It was quite good, but really, really intense and disturbing.
Church Lady
I actually enjoy the previews – they sometimes make me aware of a coming movie that I wouldn’t have known about and would probably like to see. It’s the commercials I can’t stand. It really hacks my tail to pay $9 for a ticket, $12 for a coke, small popcorn and box of candy, and then have to sit through fifteen to twenty minutes of commercials.
Our family of four saw The Dark Knight Saturday night. Two of us liked it and the other two didn’t. I thought Heath Ledger was brilliant as The Joker and certainly will deserve all the award nominations he’s sure to receive, but just don’t get all of the praise for Aaron Eckhart’s performance as Harvey Two Face. I thought he was fine, but not really memorable.
stickler
27 minutes? That’s nothing. In 1988 I was in London on a semester abroad, and me & some friends decided to catch “A Fish Called Wanda.”
So we paid our seven pounds (!), marched into the theater (after about a half-hour wait outside), and sat down. The screen was about the size of a reasonable big-screen today, so about 60″ diagonal. One inch for every person in the theater.
And the bastards proceeded to show one and one half hours of previews. No kidding. Previews, mind you, punctuated by ads for popcorn, local used cars, and candy.
I had seriously begun to believe that I had died and gone to hell. But the movie turned out to be pretty good.
Brachiator
Dude, there are thousands of grad students who could reply to you, “been there, done that.”
Hell, I can toss off in a heartbeat a riff on the mythic continuity from Homer’s depiction of the armor of Achilles in The Iliad to Nolan’s depiction of the fitting out of Bruce Wayne’s Bat suit in The Dark Knight.
Nolan plugs the Batman into the long tradition of the heroes quest. Any worthy knight must have his armor.
And just as Arthur has his Excalibur, Batman has his Batpod.
Extra Essay Credit: Christopher Nolan has admitted that the realism of the opening sequence of The Dark Knight is inspired by the movie Heat(even using an actor for that film in these early scenes). But the movie also owes a lot thematically to a couple of John Ford films.
Why so serious?
Crusty Dem
OK, even in an open thread this is off topic. At Captain Flowbee’s House of Crazy, they’re criticizing Kos because the Austin paper retracted a bogus news article. But the part I enjoyed was that they block quoted an entire freeper article. Finally, the ratfuckers are coming out of their holes.
Ned Raggett
Why not?
At the risk of self-puffery, here were my thoughts again; a similarly ambivalent but more directly negative take can be read courtesy of my friend Alfred.
Ned Raggett
(The ‘why not’ being directed to the post by Brachiator, not Crusty Dem!)
cain
My wife and I always do the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” expression at the end of each movie preview to indicate our intentions about the movie.
cain
OriGuy
Americans have nothing on Mexicans; consider lucha libre. For that matter, Japanese are nuts about the stuff.
As far as relating comic-book characters to classic mythology, Joseph Campbell did that years ago in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He called the basic structure the Monomyth.
Paul L.
OMG
The hacks at Crooks and Liars agree with our lady of perpetual outrage.
b. hussein canuckistani
Heath ledger ran away with that film so far that I didn’t even notice the guy playing Harvey Dent. But every time the Joker was on the screen, every eyeball was riveted to him. Jack Nicholson must be lying in a dumpster weeping with shame right now.
As for Watchmen, that looks f*n awesome, except for the fact that Night Owl looks too fit for the pudgy, middle-aged character in the book.
tim
Heath Ledger is outstanding as the Joker.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is miscast and has a weird mouth/lips.
Christian Bale is uninspiring as BM, and that stupid growly-voice he does when he’s BM is just stupid and annoying.
Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman are excellent.
Aaron Eckhart looks great, but kind of sucks toward the end as Two Face.
Overall, I found myself checking my watch just forty minutes into TDK…except when the Joker was onscreen.
Don’t believe the hype.
Two stars our of four, max.
Timothy Trollencritic
Ned Raggett
Thought of that myself but Ozymandias is my real weak link in this bunch — Adrian Veidt needs to be more immediately commanding in appearance, WASP/Aryan uberdude. Still, looks way more promising than I originally would have guessed.
Brachiator
Thanks for the links. I enjoyed your post on the movie. Alfred largely misses the point, though he at least gets makes an interesting point about Westerns. Alfred’s admission that he never read any of the Batman comics reminds me of a particularly boneheaded film critic who admitted that he got into film studies because he wanting to avoid reading Classical literature, and who then went on to write a spectacularly uninformed review of the film Troy. Now, I don’t think, that the average Joe has to read all the graphic novels that might have informed The Dark Knight, but even if you are going to be an amateur film critic writing a blog, you got to bring a little something more to the table.
The Dark Knight is not just a great summer film, or comic book film. It’s a good film, period. Whether or not it lives up to “the hype” is a matter of personal taste. And so, there are a lot of ways to look at it. You write about it being about beginnings and endings. It’s also ironic that the story revolves around the idea that everyone wants to get rid of the Batman. The criminals and the Joker want him out of the way for obvious reasons. But even Bruce Wayne is looking for a way to shed his alter ego in the hope that he can live a normal life with Rachel.
And of course, director Christopher Nolan plays a goof with origin stories by noticeably failing to give the Joker one. By the way, Michael Caine has noted in interviews that he gave Alfred a back story, but it is only alluded to in the movies, never dealt with directly. His Alfred is a former member of the British SAS, which actually makes sense in terms of a little story that he tells Bruce Wayne.
Campbell is a bit too reductive for my tastes, but he has his uses. His stuff about the Monomyth is weak tea compared to the more informed writings of say, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism.
flywheel
I nearly quit going to movies because the previews (isn’t a trailer something that comes behind you?) were so loud. Then I went down to the local Happiness is a Warm Gun store and got some really good ear plugs, the kind you can hear through. Problem solved.
Ned R.
Well, Alfred’s a good friend (not talking of course about Caine’s character — I’m not THAT bad!) and I give him the benefit of the doubt, partially because of a salient point another friend reminded me of — as we all know, pretty much all recent superhero films made from continuing comic book series (as opposed to 300 or Watchmen, say) aren’t going to represent those series in full — they *can’t,* by default.
Instead, to quote this other friend of mine in a private communication, such films at their best “have basically taken iconic characters with easy-to-grasp dramas and metaphors, and let them have lots of action sequences.” Point being that if we the mass audience don’t have the full knowledge of the stories and nuances of the comic books themselves — and I would never pretend to in nearly all cases — and are not specifically and clearly based on a certain run of them then the films have to stand or fall in their own right as creations working with the characters in a protean fashion. And in turn a general audience has to be engaged on that level.
Now my friend who I just quoted absolutely loved TDK with a couple of exceptions, and while it may be reductive, the film matches with his take. The questions raised in the film are messy but the characters are iconic (ambivalent hero, evil incarnate, etc.), the dramas and metaphors are meant to be easy-to-grasp regardless of how complicated they might prove in practice (which was my argument and Alfred’s as well) and there’s action sequences for sure. I’d presume Alfred agrees with that, but he doesn’t think it works for him as a film — and that’s perfectly fine.