Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

i just in particular didn't like the scene with the prisoner, i felt like it was too obviously setting up expectations and playing off them to make everyone feel good, like the director didn't have the nerve to undermine that with all sorts of ambiguity like he did most everything else. i was also kind of like, eh, let's see what foreign gang of criminals is of-the-moment in this action film, that changes but the fact they're mostly foreign never does.

ryan i like that

carl schmitt: the movie

Loved the movie, but honestly could have done with much less Rachel, Dent, and Batman. Like someone said above, Joker and Gordon made the movie for me, I got restless when they were not on the screen. I was surprised that they did not end with Dent turning into Two-Face so that he could appear in the third movie.

uh

[personally I find it difficult to disapprove of imaginary acts.]

something about this statement doesn't sound right to me. all events within fiction are imaginary acts. so does that mean we don't bring any feelings of right and wrong, approval or disapproval, ethical norms and violations, to bear on anything in fiction? I think the last poor sod to profess that was sent to Reading Gaol in 1895 - I hope he wasn't treated like Batman treated the Joker.

I was surprised that they did not end with Dent turning into Two-Face so that he could appear in the third movie.

Well then.

saddest moment for me = ledger: "i think we'll be doing this forever." that just made me feel uggggggghhh. too sad.

sadder if he said it in I'm Not There?

Okay how 'bout when he held a gun to his motherjumping head? I was mad squicked.

I didn't really have any of those feelings about Ledger. Possible explanations:
1. the film was compelling so I wasn't thinking about actors much
2. Ledger was in make-up etc so didn't look like Heath Ledger
3. great performance --> he became character, I didn't think about HL
4. most important I think: I don't know much about HL, have hardly ever seen him in a film, so while anyone's passing is sad, his name / persona doesn't really mean much to me

in fact yes I saw him as ... THE JOKER !!!

Saw Hancock last night, which I think is actually better in contrast to The Dark Knight than it would have been on its own.

After seeing TDK, I wondered if there was any pressure from studio folks to make something more compact (90-minute movie for $120 mil instead of 2hr30 for $180, more screenings per day, etc.). Hancock runs about 90 minutes, goes light where TDK goes dark, and at the same time works hard to tell a fresh superhero story (alcoholic, troubled guy in that case). Jason Bateman, with perfect timing, makes it work.

[personally I find it difficult to disapprove of imaginary acts.]

something about this statement doesn't sound right to me. all events within fiction are imaginary acts. so does that mean we don't bring any feelings of right and wrong, approval or disapproval, ethical norms and violations, to bear on anything in fiction?

sure we bring them, but they might be at odds with the author's intent. rather than morally judge acts in fiction I'd rather think about why and how they're presented. if the author invites judgment, so be it. but I'm not sure that that's what nolan's up to when he turns blowing up a hospital into a slapstick bit.

put another way; you get turned off by a porno movie - does that mean it's not an erotic film?

i didn't get any satisfaction from the interrogation scene, 'cause the joker was obviously getting a kick out of bats/the police losing their control and getting violent.

but I'm not sure that that's what nolan's up to when he turns blowing up a hospital into a slapstick bit.

hello he's called THE JOKER

x-post, which may or may not be compromised by what EIII has just written but I will post anyway, in haste:

The more I think about it, the more sure I am that Edward III is wrong in his [personally I find it difficult to disapprove of imaginary acts] position -- but the way he puts it makes it hard to deny or argue with.

But I think I have a suggestion. Insofar as fictional acts and events are hypothetical, with an 'as if' or 'what if' status, our moral judgement on them has the same status. It does sound foolish to disapprove of something that doesn't exist. But there is a modality in which fictional events do exist, a speculative / conjunctural one, and within that modality, that level of thinking if you like, our moral judgements about it exist just as much. We make moral judgements about fiction which are proportionate to fiction, which belong to the same universe as the fiction.

This is a vast and vexed question, but you only need imagine fictions about all kinds of terrible acts to see that you could not, would not, approach them with an amoral attitude in which the moral content of the actions was irrelevant to your response. For a fairly non-shocking example which also raises all the questions of beauty's relation to morality, aesthetics to ethics, we need only go back to Lolita.

I find it difficult to disapprove of imaginary acts

strangely enough, i thought it summed it up for me very nicely.

yeah, you can go to the movies and empathise with the characters, but an outpouring of grief for a hospital blowing up in a comic book film or i'm not entertained by sadism, had to look away (well, preferred to look away) during some of the really violent scenes, and kept getting stuck on little moments of "that's racist, that is so xenophobic." is surely taking it way too far?

the film exists to put a good guy and a bad guy into a climactic final showdown that looks good, is played stylishly and has a few killer lines- even with a director with ambitions as lofty as nolan may have can't lift it into the realms of humanitarian studies.

Zing?

not sure? i just can't stand to watch a lot of onscreen violence because i prefer not to carry that around with me, like once you see something horrifying you can't un-see it

like gigli

I do have less tolerance for violence as I get older, yes.

actually i wish i could have un-read a particular Joker story some kid in my elementary school class had a copy of, maybe it was in an anthology, I guess this was around the time the burton batman movie came out. not a comic book, just prose, but.. really terrifying, i remember it to this day.

which one???

hey my friend wrote a review

Well, I finally caught A Dark Night Turns starring deceased lothario, Keith Olbermann. Aside from his starring role as America's Funnyman, this film was an interminable mess. Still, his transcendent performance should get him some good looks from the luminaries who make these modern day parables come to the silver screen. I see a very bright future for this young man! Can't wait to see what the future holds for Olbermann.

I enjoy the many acts of violence on screen as it makes me forget I want to slaughter half of this world

jordan -> google tells me that apparently in 1989 they had a bunch of horror writers put together stories for a collection called 'further adventures of the joker'? i think it was in that. i suppose there was something that struck me about stephen king type of horror (which was v scary at age 10) + characters i was already familiar with. at least i didn't make it up!

i just can't stand to watch a lot of onscreen violence because i prefer not to carry that around with me, like once you see something horrifying you can't un-see it -- daria-g

I enjoy the many acts of violence on screen as it makes me forget I want to slaughter half of this world -- Bo Jackson Overdrive

I definitely see both side of this. Screen violence as an imaginary and harmless proxy for your own pent-up aggression is not a bad thing. But lord knows I have a large, varied, and disturbing cache of violent images from movies and TV stored up already, on file in my brain for immediate access anytime. So, I'm good, thanks.

So, to sum up, man smart, woman smarter. :)

lol, I in no way think my way is the right way necessarily, I am pretty much desensitized to all forms of screen violence and there's no doubt it's had an effect on me!

pussies, all of you. y'all deserve to have batman shove you around a little. builds character.

I had a nightmare of horrible bloodshed last night thx to watching Batmovie yesterday. But I do that after every creepy movie, a nightmare of some sort. It does have an effect, tho.

Bale should have replied to reporters:

"It's not who I am on the inside, its what I do that defines me"

i've had dreams where I've murdered people before but not usually after movies, usually when I'm depressed.

oddly enough I didn't have any Batman themed dreams after seeing it either time...maybe the third time's a charm!

Violence has a way of going right to the ol' lizard brain, and that's not always a bad thing. There's some screen violence I wouldn't do without. Life would be just a tiny bit sadder if I'd never seen, for instance, William Munny down a bottle of whiskey and blow away seven dudes. But that visceral thrill is too easy to overuse, and a lot of films and directors (coughSCORSESEcough) use it for its own sake, often occluding the filmmaker's own intended effect. It seems a shame when a movie has a point view and a moral and a purpose, and years later you think back on it and only remember that one really gruesome scene.

probably depends on background too. someone like me who grew up in suburbia and didn't see a lot of this growing up may have it hit less close to home than someone who grew up around violence.

Surely two very different issues?

maybe. batman rox.

Yeah, I'm not really including Batman kicking ass. Go ahead, punch away, and have a big wet thwack sound to go with it, that's cool. I'm thinking more like the stitching-up scene in Pan's Labyrinth. OMG so disgusting, so fetishistic. Like daria said, you can't un-see shit like that.

I'm not a big horror movie buff, if'n you can't tell.

It seems a shame when a movie has a point view and a moral and a purpose, and years later you think back on it and only remember that one really gruesome scene.

an excellent point. it's like that saying: you can be shooting a love scene but the moment there is nudity you are making a documentary.

not if there's a lot of fancy lighting and shadow

to be serious though, i love fantasy/horror violence.

if i'm ever bothered by violence in films it's usually realistic beatings or potrayals of domestic abuse that get me.

otm, that's why it's hard for me to forgive Scorsese for all the "surprise you're dead" stuff in The Departed (like someone mentioned upthread), because he also made Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, so I know he knows the difference.

bah i've been thinking and writing about this fkn movie why because it intersting. this is deep into ain't it cool/livejournal territory, but thx for you patience...

Taking back what I said before, I think there was some subtext, but it’s buried beneath both the violent flashiness and “rhetorical” flashiness – the love triangle plot has more to do with what’s going on than anything, but it was given less weight in the edit room it seems. What was Cilian Murphy even doing in this movie? The movie is cut around the Joker, it’s true.

The foreground is that Bruce Wayne is sick of the Batman act, because of what it cost him (Rachel), plus it’s physically punishing, and it has somewhat backfired. The city is no safer: since he owns the night, crime has moved into broad daylight, and other amateur vigiliantes are out there hurting people and getting hurt. He wanted inspiration, not imitation. He was hoping it wouldn’t take that long for Gotham to reach a tipping point of security, if everyone would just believe!, but it hasn’t happened. He’s on a treadmill.

Enter Harvey, who can solidify Batman’s gains legitimately, and, in doing so, allow him to quit being both Batman and “Bruce Wayne” the fuckup playboy (Bale is really great as this third version of himself, immediately slurring his lines, clueless). Wayne pushes Harvey too hard and too fast, but Harvey is more than willing to go just as far. A true believer, this Harvey, with more than a touch of self-delusion about him, and willing to “go vigilante” himself (the detainee torture comment comes here – but of course his game of chance with other people’s lives is rigged, until he becomes Two-Face).

The writers give Rachel a hint of a complaint that Wayne-as-Batman may get Harvey killed, and not just to save the city (as Harvey believes) but to win her away. It’s no wonder Wayne saves Dent, he’s been careless and duplicitous with him most of all. Besides, we have to believe that if he saved Rachel and let Dent die, she would never have him anyway.

The movie is concerned with how people communicate about themselves, what they try to get others to believe, both individually, and as a mass. It would have been better, I guess, if the movie had less about boatfuls of people blowing each other up (or not) and more about how all these characters have to tend to their own fictions in order to function. The Joker lying as a matter of routine, unexplained, about his “origin” was a great touch – he doesn’t really lie about anything else. But as an Iago figure, he wasn’t given enough of the talent to see through people’s bullshit. I though maybe it would be obvious to him, at some point, who Batman was.

The Joker keeps taunting Batman that they are the same kind, a pair of freaks, but everyone knows this is not true, it’s kind of an ineffective taunt. Unfortunately, Rachel agrees with the Joker on this point: what Bruce has done to his life is bonkers; the fact that he’s really good at it only counts against him. She has chosen to give herself finally to Harvey, a fact that Alfred keeps concealed, knowing that Wayne’s self-conception has to be carefully managed as well. Wayne chooses Dent and the City over love, which Dent never fully understands. This also proves Rachel right, in a way: it is crazy, but also worthy. Everyone has to be lied to, about something. (This gets garbled and lost, in the conclusion, I think. All the stuff about “responsibility” was weak).

Both Rachel and Harvey (ultimately) die, and Bruce lives on, without knowing the full story they were a part of, maybe this is what seems sadistic about the movie. That, or all the cops shot in the face. The Batman-Dent plan to save Gotham instantly shifts to a Batman-Gordon PR offensive about Dent, post-mortem. This is cynical stuff; do they have that little faith in Gothamites to live with the truth? Is a white knight that important? Do they judge “the soul of Gotham” – the key to all the politics of the film – completely wrong? Maybe this is why Armond White called the movie’s “ideology” disgusting.

(i realize there's some controversy over who Batman intended to save...)

Batman wanted to ride Dent hard

Oh my gosh goole you have made this movie sound like an episode of House M.D.! Very nice.

Wayne chooses Dent and the City over love

Are you talking specifically about who Batman decided to rescue? Because I thought that Batman had every intention of going to Rachel, and the Joker swapped the addresses so that whichever one Batman wanted to get to would be the one he left behind.

okay nm xpost didn't see your followup.

I will be seeing the movie again this weekend so I will try to pay close attention during the scene. However from what I remember didn't Batman clearly yell "RACHEL" to Gordon?

yeah you're probably right, lol oh well!