Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

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.

that's the point of the joker! he was genuinely scary in this but also, you know, funny and clever.

xp

that's the point of the joker! he was genuinely scary in this but also, you know, funny and clever.

It's the Clockwork Orange Effect again: the villain is so seductive that it throws the movie out of whack.

I beat this into the ground in my blog, admittedly, but I think it's less throwing the movie out of whack than it is the audience (potentially).

they should have told ledger to act worse

I don't know, Alex the Droog was given a lot more facetime doing his ordinary things, having things he loved in life besides wanton anarchy. And he actually had a downfall, a chance to ponder what his life is/was all about. He had joy in music, and in women (for better or for worse). Joker was just an amoral killing machine, one note sadist. I mean, an interesting & novel sadist to be sure, but not a sympathetic one IMO.

He's a complete unreliable narrator, too, which gave me a harder time being like, 'Wow, what a shitty life' rather than 'Wow, what a shitty dude.'

I understand. I'm trying to figure out why this movie had me in so many knots, and why the violence repelled me. I don't think Nolan is resourceful enough as a director or writer to tease the ambiguities without relying on monologues. It's far from a great movie, but Iron Man did a better job with its geopolitical subplot. (xxpost)

Joker was just an amoral killing machine, one note sadist.

So was Alex in the movie!

I thought Alex was a lot more complex at least. Not that I'm #1 Droog Devotchka here.

batman villains have always been more colorful and sympathetic than batman. but i agree, there is almost zero comic relief in this movie, so it's kind of disturbing to only laugh at the joker while he's pulling off some violent shit.

xxxxp

I don't think Nolan is resourceful enough as a director or writer to tease the ambiguities without relying on monologues

I think the monologues were a cover in the end -- maybe an unintentional one but even so.

'clockwork orange effect'?? this is a charge that's been leveled at paradise lost, othello, all kinds of stuff, hell, even schindler's list! ralph fiennes is better than liam neeson, sorry! in any case, i don't buy it, the aesthetic power of a bad guy doesn't change the moral logic at all. are you going to shoot up your school, alfred?

"Did you ever dance...? with the devil...? in the pale moonlight? PS I made Harvey Dent bonkers."

the little jokes about bruce wayne hanging out with hot chicks (what did alfred say after bruce left him on the boat with the Russians btw?) or the exchange after the lamboghini crash really stuck out, b/c this was not a one-liner kind of movie.

i don't buy it, the aesthetic power of a bad guy doesn't change the moral logic at all. are you going to shoot up your school, alfred?

You didn't read my post and what I said about the hero.

Yeah, they pretty much screamed "Bruce Wayne: kind of a prick!" to me.

xp

well you're right, it was an xp

xp again

but that's not the real bruce wayne, i mean if people knew that he was intense and humorless then they might suspect he was batman.

actually it kind of bothered me that he let those partygoers see him go into his little secret passage. since batman showed up a minute later, wouldn't they wonder?!

okay I don't know what it is, but I LOVE the Joker - even in the 1989 "Batman", loved the Joker (I would scrawl "Joker was Here" almost everywhere when I was 9 years old). So, in viewing this, I found myself consistently rooting for the Joker instead of Batman.

I was rooting for Ed Koch

by the time the Joker got to his umpteenth retelling of his creation story (very ably handled, by the way), I was ready for him to say, "I was fishin' buddies with this cowboy. I couldn't quit'em, so he had to stick me."

Jordan, Alfred said "What's Russian for 'apply your own bloody sunscreen'" or something very close to that. I remember it because my friends and I were some of the only people who laughed at that line.

alfred, lord custos

I think Cillian Murphy is generally considered the best looking actor of his generation. Ally's views are to be treated as that of a dangerous maverick.
-- Alba (Alba), Tuesday, 1 August 2006

weird things upthread

xp What about Bruce rescuing those cops who were tied and gagged in that apartment? Kind of conspicuous, no?

Really, the nitpicks I have with this one are minor, save the Lower Wacker car chase. "Go to the lower level!?!? We'll be sitting ducks!" Um, yeah.

this was true:

So, I finally got around to seeing Batman: Mask of the Phantasm last night. I'm not sure if it's as great as some have hyped it to me, but it's really more solid than a lot of the 90s Batman films and does some interesting rewriting of the Batman origin story including a romantic interest that's scripted more maturely than other film versions, and it's in a cartoon! The whole thing reminded me how great the Batman animated series was.

-- mh, Tuesday, 19 June 2007

My guess is Dark Knight will only give us Two-Face's origin story (since in the trailers Eckhart is only shown as Dent, not as Two-Face), and he will be a more prominent villain in the possible future Batman movies.
-- Tuomas, Thursday, 3 July 2008

this movie woulda been even awesomer if General Zod appeared in a crossover classic.............

i thought i posted this earlier, but they totally should've gotten the animated series dude (kevin conroy) to do the batvoice.

xp What about Bruce rescuing those cops who were tied and gagged in that apartment? Kind of conspicuous, no?

he left their blindfolds on though, didn't he?

Yeah, he just took the gag off of one of them. Next time I see it, I'll try to remember to see if he uses his Batvoice when he talks to them.

He did.

I liked this movie quite a lot. Very long, yes. But the action was often interesting, tense, suspenseful - I suppose *exciting* was the word.

What I most didn't like about it: so much extremity (violence and desperation) that was then sort of forgotten by characters 5 minutes later. eg: joke's mad death race with truck, most dangerous person on the planet - they put him in a cell ... then leave him with some cop and an easy way to get out? why? why not ... lock the cell?

Or: that whole truck death race was to save Harvey Dent in the truck. so as soon as they get him out, they ... stick him in an anonymous car driven by someone nobody notices or recognizes. It matters (if any of it matters) cos this how he gets caught and turned into Two-Face.

or even, earlier: Police Commissioner killed by terribly dangerous, omnipresent gang of villains - so what do they do? hold huge parade down a street full of sniper positions, get whole police force in a place where they (+ mayor, Gordon, Dent, et al) are vulnerable to villains. I don't think so.

and: Joke so dangerous, has escaped Gotham Central. Batman has already shown he can't kill him. After all that desperate chasing around they are back to square one, just watching him blow up hospitals etc and clearing up the mess ... and they just keep pursuing Joker, but to what end? don't they think it'll just end up the same way? Bats still won't be able to kill Joker, and we have seen Joker escape already. but Bats keeps trying to confront Joker.

or: scene with pile of cash that Joker burns - after everything Joker has done, practically blowing up whole city, local mobster squares up to him and sneers at him as pathetic freak or something. ?? this is like some knife gangster from Deptford going toe to toe with Osama bin Laden. again: I don't think so.

and: given how many times Joker is in a disguise, or someone gets into a car and gets abducted, or a place turns out to be mined with bombs or whatever - frustrating that they keep letting the same things happen - don't seem to learn that the world around them is dangerous. comical at one point when Bats sends Gordon a text message saying 'watch out'. no kidding!

I didn't like Joker's speeches about anarchy, 'you're a freak like me', all that nonsense. People go on about the Bats = Joker line but it doesn't add up. He's not like the Joker - he's incredibly virtuous, is constantly doing good. This is very different from constantly trying to kill innocent people. Sure, by real-world logic someone in a Batman costume wld seem odd. But in a world in which Batman exists, and can do what he does, and has shown his powers etc, he wldn't seem like a 'costumed freak' anymore. But anyway, all Joker's talk about pro-Anarchy, anti-Planning = utter hokum as he has by far the most complex Plans of anyone in the picture. I can only excuse this as lies that he tells Dent to try to make him go bad. And he succeeds. Wld Dent really go out to kill innocent people, like Gordon's family? I don't see it - can't see the motivation working in that way. OK, so it's all hokum, a fellow with half his face blown off. But aren't we also supposed to be taking it Seriously, somehow?

And the ending, where Bats says he will take responsibility for deaths and is thus 'hunted' - he doesn't need to! why not just let it be understood that these people died in Joker-related violence?

That seems like a long list of things I didn't like. Things I did like, though:
- action etc as above
- Batman voice fine by me, funny.
- Bruce Wayne with chicks, quite a droll spectacle really.
- Maggie Gyllenhall looks very good! I don't get people that don't like her. when she was interrogating the Chinese accountant geezer I loved watching her
- Bats in Hong Kong - kind of like an acceptable version of James Bond, or M-I.
- opening bank heist with Joker + clowns told to kill each other - good actually, I think
- in general, the film much more of a Police Procedural than a Superhero picture, at times. I have never seen THE WIRE but my guess is that this was an attempt to make a Batman film somewhat like that. Or maybe ALLY MCBEAL.
- I just really liked Batman! with his great virtue, realiability, proficiency, infinite skill, Batmobile, motorbike, incorrigibility - he was terrific to watch! and every time he shows up in a scene (including suddenly the one where Jokes is interrogated), it's really exciting!

golly, I have written Joker as Joke and even Jokes, above. J0eks, bro, J0kes.

I liked Maggie Gyllenhaal too: a welcome no-nonsense presence.