Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

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.

I guess that is true. But I don't remember it looking like a cop car. I think they should have flagged this up much more, let us see the driver properly - because later on this becomes a big plot point (WHAT ARE THE NAMES OF THE CORRUPT COPS? etc), but we don't really have any images or sense of those cops to hang it on.

What I wrote about Batman being a fucknut:

As far as moral ambiguity goes, having just read The Dark Knight Returns, The Long Halloween, and Arkham Asylum, which I gather are possibly the most morally fucked of all Batman stories, I have just one thing to say; Bruce Wayne is a fucking psychopath. Bruce Wayne is 2 millimetres away from being a fucknut crazy costumed psychokiller every bit as bad as The Joker. And that 2 millimetres distance is all posited by his own psyche in the "not killing" thing. He dresses as a bat and beats criminals, who, lest we forget, are often driven to crime by bad social politics rather than being inherently nasty or bad or evil, which (politics) Wayne has no interest in getting involved in (despite his money and potential influence) because he'd rather be a nasty, vengeful motherfucker and beat people the fuck up because HE'S A CRAZY VIOLENT FUCKNUT. But he's delusional; he thinks he's a fucking saint, he thinks he's doing the city (world?) a favour by taking down the bad guys. Only thing is, he;s not; he's attracting worse bad guys, by being a great big fucking blazing sign saying "crazy violent fucknuts are welcome in Gotham". He justifies his own nasty, violent, murderous tendencies not by ignoring or dismissing or sublimating or using them to drive acts of good, but by acting them out without going to far, where the only thing that is too far is killing people. So he hospitalises them. He breaks their ribs. He drives them insane with fear. He ninjas the shit out of them in darkened warehouses. Because he's a fucknut. A crazy batshit fucknut. Where do you think the term 'batshit' came from?

The appealing thing about him is that... we all... or a lot of us, at least, have these same violent impulses. When some chav cunt cuts me up in his Max Powered shag wagon car, spilling fumes all over my road, his basebal cap on backwards and his next date-rape victim in his sights, I wish I had a Glock with a silencer in my glove compartment and could cap the little fucker's head off, or cut off his balls so he can't spawn more little social-Darwinist survival-of-the-most-promiscuous-nasty-little-date-rapists spawn to further fuck-up our world. Because, though I may vote liberal and work in education and have gay and black and asian friends and listen to jazz and eat 'world cuisine', at some level, I am a Frank Miller-esque fascist and I want to see scum cleaned up because it's easier than creating / enabling a world that discourages scum from existing. Judge Dredd. Batman. Judge Dredd is just the ultimate acceptance that Batman is more effective than the police who are more effective than benevolent social policy. Batman is the crazy little fucked-up black heart, the ticking mind-clock of batshit violence. Batman is the cunt-kicking, scum-punching, impulse-accepting twitch in all of us. He could go off any minute. he lives in a shitty world and he feels guilty for being above it in his beautiful big old golden palace of Wayne Manor, and his parents may be dead but SUCH PRIVILEGE, AND I'M STILL NOT HAPPY, WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME??!! So he snaps, he breaks, he goes and ninjas fuck out of all the things he can't fix through love, because he doesn't understand love. If only he'd been bought a kitten, he'd be OK.

He dresses as a bat and beats criminals, who, lest we forget, are often driven to crime by bad social politics rather than being inherently nasty or bad or evil

aw, c'mon. what superhero film has ever pretended to be a kitchen sink social study?

X-Men. Watchmen. Fantastic Four. Most of them, actually, in one way or another.

I think that's a load of bollocks. Batman is a hero.

Also incredibly cliched bollox, like 6th-form fanzine c.1988 bollox ... Martin Skidmore was probably turning down crappy submissions like this 20 years ago.

22 years ago 'crappy submissions' like this were being written by Frank Miller. Batman, as I understand him as portrayed by Nolan and the source material Nolan has gone for, is a violent nutcase. Yes, he has 'good intentions' but so do lots of psychos, I'm sure. Batman as total, 100% hero is just as cliched.

in a two hour movie about a man in a cape with lots of cool gadgets and vehicles, where you have to cram in a villain or two with backstory, is it really a fair/valid criticism to say 'we didn't get enough explanation of WHY the violent henchman is a violent henchman! Who's the REAL victim here, people?'.

it's not really why people go to see a batman movie, is it?

batman, in miller's works as far as i've read them, is far from accepted universally as a 100% sane and admirable hero.

batman has always been more of a necessary evil kind of hero, which is why he's much more interesting than, say, superman.

Also, one thing emphasized in some comics (although this doesn't appear in DK, AA or LH) Bruce Wayne in his public persona is indeed a shiftless layabout - but that's a disguise too! He works behind the scenes through proxies on social programs like free clinics, underprivileged youth, all levels of education, etc. He's careful about the social and political implications of the corporate activity he funds (Lex Luthor has been a rival in this respect.) And so on. This has nothing to do with the movie, of course, which def. tries to have its cake and eat it too by having Wayne recognize Batman as a totally fucking fascist thing that he wants to step away from, but also gives him all the best clothes, chicks and toys.

In the film the chicks are clearly a decoy - there is no evidence that BW does anything with them except stepping out of choppers. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe he is supposed actually to be a womanizer? I didn't really get that impression; he seems hung up on Rachel D anyway.

The word 'fascist' is very carelessly thrown around in discussions like this. Fascism arguably involves a strong state, military spending, law & order, patriotism, perhaps the persecution of minorities. Batman's heroic-crime-fighting-outlaw-secret-identity-vigilante-(who doesn't kill or use a gun) doesn't really have much to do with that, I don't think.

A lame source, perhaps, but the wiki entry on fascism:

"Fascism is a term used to describe authoritarian nationalist political ideologies or mass movements that are concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence and seek to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race, and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity. ... but the following elements are usually seen as its integral parts: patriotism, nationalism, statism, militarism, totalitarianism, anti-communism, economic planning (including corporatism and autarky), populism, collectivism, autocracy and anti-liberalism (i.e., opposition to political and economic liberalism)."

Most of that has very little to do with Batman, I think. It would make as much sense to call Superman a fascist icon (he's more 'patriotic', after all - Batman almost never refers to America or the nation) - but it probably wouldn't be worth doing that either.

Okay, fascism maybe isn't exactly accurate. But he's still a wealthy and powerful guy using his own resources to impose his vision of social order by circumventing the legal and political systems. That's not exactly truth justice and the american way.

Your last point is part of my point: 'truth, justice and the American way' sounds more like a fascist slogan than anything Batman has ever said.

In the film the chicks are clearly a decoy - there is no evidence that BW does anything with them except stepping out of choppers. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe he is supposed actually to be a womanizer? I didn't really get that impression; he seems hung up on Rachel D anyway.

this was explained as decoy behaviour in the first nolan batman.

legal system != justice, hence dark, violent, vigilante satisfying superheroes.

batman's big i'm-watching-you computer is admirably 'fascist' or at least orwellian (i guess those are difft things)

people are saying pretty otm things. bale/batman is pretty boring, not particularly sympathetic. joker is fantastic, and far more interesting. maggie g is great. and cute. oldman is similarly good (as usual).

this is really stunning on imax

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i thought there were some missteps--overwrought, not-particularly-well-thought-out speeches and dialogue about justice, truth, heroism chief among them--but the filmmaking was so tight and well-paced that i didnt care (or, just as soon as i was getting really annoyed with some bit of dialogue, theyd cut to a sweeping shot of the city)

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You genuinely thought this movie was well-paced, max? It turned downright slovenly in the last 45 minutes.

yeah by well-paced i mostly meant just as soon as i was getting really annoyed with some bit of dialogue, theyd cut to a sweeping shot of the city--the end drags on a little long and once joker is out of the picture i was just sort of zzzzzzzzzzz

has anyone noticed how much better the sequels to most of the recent superhero movies are than the original? spider-man 2, x2, now this? and then the third movie usually sucks.

i don't think either of those films were better than the originals. i didn't see the third of either.

I've been thinking about that; my guess is that because each 'first' film almost necessarily needs to deal with the origin of the hero in question, that the first films exist almost from the get-go as introductions before you get to the actual story the director wants to tell. Also, the first film is a training ground for testing out new ideas. By the third film, everyone's too comfortable with what can be done, and so quality control, in the form of "can we manage this?' being answered with "yes" but not countered with "should we bother?", evaporates and "pile on the villains" one-upmanship cuts in, and you get Spidey 3 or The Last Stand.

Does that make sense?

yeah thats what i was thinking too

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.

i dont remember the speech that well but i thought this was less that joker doesnt have any plans and more that he makes plans without a point--he's less 'anarchic' than he is, like, 'anti-utilitarian' or something. there are no ends in joker's world.