Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

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.

In the "Fresh Air" interview, Bale says that really was him standing up on the edge of the Sears Tower in the Batsuit. Was that overhead shot one of the ones shot with Imax cameras?

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's definitely no fun to criticize filmmakers for making the mistakes of their predecessors.

One great bit of poetry: Ledger's sashay in the nurse's uniform, as the hospital explodes. My God, it was Tati-esque.

That whole sequence, really. Especially when you think he's going to do the 'walk away while things blow up' bit in full but then nothing happens and he gets all annoyed.

yes!

The sad thing about Ledger's death is that as an actor he was learning how to move in character. So few of the young 'uns did it, and in this, the middling Casanova, and BBM he was developing a talent for it.

"I want my phonecall...I want it. I want my phonecall"

I'd like to watch this again or go over the script to really break it down, but one of the reasons the Joker is so appealing is he's confident in what he's doing. Watching Bruce Wayne, philanthropic billionaire superhero, question his own worth is some tedious shit. That's what lesser characters like Rachel "Impartial System" Dawes are for.

I just really liked Batman! with his great virtue, realiability, proficiency, infinite skill, Batmobile, motorbike, incorrigibility - he was terrific to watch!

I just have to say i loved this...what a succinct way to sum up the appeal of a superhero!

kerm - i think watching bruce wayne worry about that is not interesting, and the idea that he'd quit and turn himself in despite all the high minded stuff he said, that is kind of BS too. i'm really ambivalent about all these superhero movies anyway because i usually find them fundamentally reactionary so i tend to like this because it's a mess. imho watching bruce wayne show up with yet another woman used as set decoration is also tedious, so sure thing his other neuroses are likely to be. armond white's review is fun..

Ever since Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic-novel reinvention, The Dark Knight Returns, pop consumers have rejected traditional moral verities as corny.

OK but i reject them as patriarchal and Republican? :) that said in a vague way i did think there were some positive things, something about the public sphere, like when the mayor and other officials all marched in the streets for that funeral.. I can't believe I'm thinking this much about it but could probably have written a term paper on dent/two face and public life versus private life and theorize that the one doesn't affect the other so the city leaders were perfectly correct in applauding what he did in office. still think dent was the most interesting character in the movie.

but the low- and high-pitched electronic drones worked REALLY well! sort of lynchian--they were clearly not coming from anything IN the film, but they weren't exactly proper "scoring" either.

It seemed a mite There Will Be Blood to me. I wouldn't be surprised if that was actually an influence.

Wow, went to see another movie at a neighborhood 4-plex -- tonight's Dark Knight shows were sold out (even 10 p.m.) and folks were buying tickets for tomorrow night.

I just wrote a big long spiel on the Stylus board about how Bruce Wayne is a nasty violent batshit nutcase rather than a virtuous moral hero, but the server's crashed so I can't C&P it.

Admittedly, that's based on graphic novels rather than The Dark Knight (which I've not seen yet).

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.

??? They put him in a cop car, with a cop -- one of the corrupt ones from Gordon's Major Crimes Unit.