Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

chaki otm

haha

Bale's batman voice = Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse. You heard it here first.

-- Kath, Saturday, July 19, 2008 3:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

it borders on harvey fierstein @ times..so terrible

what did people think of the score? some was really overbearing i thought (esp. first like 20 minutes); other parts were v. good, im thinking the more "noise" sections that reminded me of a woman in the dunes

it wasn't bad, I thought the funniest moment was.. someone asks the Joker whether he thinks he's just going to steal all their money or something & he's like, "uh, yeah?" there were a few extremely lame moments that annoyed me. I thought eckhart was pretty great. was the mayor wearing eyeliner? that was cool.

Major Crimes? Sheeeeeeeeeeeeit.

The mayor (Nestor Carbonell) always looks like he's wearing eyeliner. Especially as Richard Alpert on Lost.

I like the batman voice. It sounds like me if I had to be as deep and gruff.

I still think Gotham Central needs to be a fucking TV series.

the mayor was really good! (eyeliner notwithstanding)

BATMANUEL

lol

anyway, this was great. i really got into the overserious heavyosity of it. there was so much EXCESS, like the solution to movie making problems is always to have more and more of everything, more violence and politics and love stories and psychology and gadgets and big speeches and moral dilemmas and on and on and on.

i think the haters of this movie (thinking basically of denby and a. white here) who have got their panties in a bunch about a humble comic book film deigning to take on the apocalypse now mantle or whatever, are just kind of stuck. like, it doesn't take any critical work at all to pick out the politics and the thematic stuff about identity and legitimacy and the purposes of violence and law and all that -- all that shit is broadcast in the loudest way possible. where's the critical fun in that?

it'd be one thing to make strong reading that uh fantastic four: rise of the silver surfer is a set of interlocking parables about force, order, and civic responsibility or whatever, but tDK is practically begging every last punter to read it that way in every scene -- there's basically no subtext to this movie at all and therefore nothing for a poor critic to do boo hoo

let me say 'or whatever' a few more times

where's the critical fun in that?

True enough. I had my own thoughts.

Was Michael Bay's "Dark Knight" script linked to here yet? BBCode is hassling me about the URL so here it is: http://my.spill.com/profiles/blog/show%3Fid%3D947994%3ABlogPost%3A355506

that's a pretty convincing negative review you wrote there, goole. unless your idea of fun is being hit over the head by something!

sometimes it is!

i mean, led zeppelin weren't subtle either.

some ppl seem to be complaining that this movie tries to do too much and lays it all on too thick -- i don't think they are seeing something that isn't there, i just think those things are good, in this case.

funny, i like my talky human story type movies to be focused and tightly made (before sunset = awes, magnolia = straight garbage), but i have always liked it when big-budget summer movies try to "make people think". it's easy to find that sort of thing tedious and even condescending, i guess, but i love it. if it works.

i just think the dialog sucked, the music cues were terrible and the ending was underwhelming. did anyone actually care when rachel died?

i think the batman cared

did anyone actually care when rachel died?

sure!

I cared enough to keep thinking she was actually alive, and then the end of the film came and I was all "WTF"

I saw it last yesterday. I liked it, but two things struck me:

1)Gotham City. Remember the first two movies, and parts of the last, where Gotham seemed like this awesome alternative reality New York City? Now it just looks like a city. Wasn't this shot in Chicago? It doesn't look like Gotham. It looks like Chicago.

2)The batman voice has gotten really, really bad. Ruining it for the future bad.

Yeah, the Bale-Batman growl voice is kind of distracting most of the time. I've got no gripes about the real (and sometimes boring) look of Gotham. The films are already stylized enough with Batman and any villain he comes across as it is.

(Although I did think that for a city the supposed size of Gotham, Gotham General Hospital seemed kind of small)

I don't have a problem with the Batman voice because I think of it in the same terms as "Bruce Wayne, Idiotic Playboy Billionaire" in that Wayne isn't all that good at pulling off the masquerade-requiring portions of his life.

the batman animated series pulled off the bw/batman voice change much better.

I liked the down-to-earth Gotham city. After years of production-designed-to-death Gothams it's a breath of fresh air as far as I'm concerned.

The voice is lame, but whatcha gonna do.

Really my only gripes with this film were some sloppy pacing/editing issues. The plot moves along so fast and there's so much going on that you find yourself wondering, "ok, why are we in this building now?".

watched Begins again last night and found it to be *really* average, (considering i was gushing over it upon it's initial release)

wtf is up with christian bale's real life accent?

Bale & Nolan are going to be on NPR's Fresh Air today.

unless your idea of fun is being hit over the head by something!

usually, i completely hate that but somehow I found it acceptable when it hit you over the head with way too many things and confusing plot twists to spend much time bothering to dwell on one Big Idea. i guess that might be a fault but i saw it just the opposite.

my wife and i had a serious discussion after the movie about whether the batman voice is just bruce wayne talking with a raspy voice or whether the batsuit has some kind of voice modulation system built in.

i'm not reading this thread, but generally i thought the movie was a fairly average summer popcorn movie, with the exception of ledger, who was great. i wished it was rated r, because it was weird how the movie kept getting scary and tense and then cutting away at the moment of actual violence. also it got better as it went, first half seemed really compressed and overedited

Nolan on KCRW's The Treatment this week too.

i wished it was rated r, because it was weird how the movie kept getting scary and tense and then cutting away at the moment of actual violence

^yeah this. i made the same statement essentially. cutting was too harried.

it still felt pretty brutal. actually showing dudes throats/cheeks getting slashed might have been a bit much?

a few ppl have said this is the most ridiculous "pg-13" movie ever, and that's right on. no swearing or boobs, but a knife goes into a dude's mouth once every 17 minutes or so, christ

You know, I just saw "Hellboy 2" a few days before "The Dark Knight." Both are films with (basically) no blood, boobs or bad words that got PG-13s. And yet, "Hellboy" should have been PG (no doubt the PG-13 came from the presence of the word "hell" in the title) and, as far as these things go, "Dark Knight" should probably have been an R. I mean, jeez, "Once" was rated R! "Dark Night" was "Silence of the Lambs" sick and sadistic, albeit mostly off-screen.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/21/arts/Batman600.jpg

I don't like how in scenes with the two ferries the movie teeters on nihilism, then timidly pulls back. It's all of a piece with the way in which it uses violence for kicks and thrills, as if all that You Complete Me stuff provided a moral carapace for Nolan's sadism.

Fans have been hungering for a Batman film they think they deserve for so long that I can understand the enthusiasm for this one, but it's not for me. The film's a dishonest piece of filmmaking. And what on EARTH convinced them to rate this a PG-13???

I think it's more complicated than blaming it all on Nolan.

What do you mean by dishonest?

Man, there are always two things that get my hackles up:

1. Terrifying: Unsafe driving! I can't even WATCH people play GTA bcz of this. I think this, of all things in the movie, put me on the edge of my seat. (Of course this is my own little ting.)

2. Heartbreaking: exploitation of the mentally ill. Him sewing a phone into a schizophrenic guy made me way more distressed than psych-101-text ship duel.

That said, I liked this movie quite a bit. I think Joker should have been in the nurse dress the whole time, tho.

Also, Alfred OTM on another 'wtf?' moment from the MPAA. Some people had brought their four-year-old kids!

Wz Harvey Dent's face CG? If so, oh man, A+ jobs.

Comics movies aren't just for kids anymore!

It wants to make a statement on The Darkness Within, but seems more interested in the knives and subtly moving us to sympathize with the Joker, if only because he's more interesting than boring old Bale (Batman is a TOTAL cipher here), and the expository speeches that pile up like the corpses at the conclusion don't help.

I didn't think he was one whit sympathetic. I think this may be due to my rock-solid "no jerkwads" policy.

Also, I can't be the only one who thought jokers lip-licking and -smacking looked like lingering tardive dyskinesia, can I? I've read a lot of references to that little tic being an expression of his sadism, but none that picked up on it being a suggestion that he was heavily medicated for a long time at some point in his past.

i just figured it was a side effect of having a cut up mouth

I think he would have had more body tics, but if that was meant to be TDKs, I'm really impressed! I can't believe, tho, that he wasn't being pumped full of adavan (atavan?) and geodon at every venture and arrest. It's what they do to anyone even mildly crazy-seeming!

Srsly I mean they would have thrown that dude on 1000 mg Seroqueal STAT.