Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

or NKVDemon

Kids these days have never heard of the KGB, much less the NKVD.

They'll have to update it to the Al-Quedassassin or something.

They'll call him Al-Qaedaemon or better, Baal- Qaeda.

so much good stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_villains

Calendar Man Detective Comics #259 (September 1958) Julian Day, also known as the Calendar Man, is known for committing crimes that corresponded with significant dates.

Film Freak Batman #395 (May 1986) Burt Weston is a wannabe actor who dreams of getting a big break by playing quirky villains. When each of his plans fails, he fakes his death similar to the movie The Sting. He is later killed by Bane.

Penny Plunderer World's Finest Comics #30 (September/October 1947) Joe Coyne, a thief obsessed with penny-oriented crimes, starts his career selling newspapers for pennies. He is later caught stealing pennies.

More why so seriously, I mentioned elsewhere the idea of an emphasis on 'bestial' villains - something is causing wierdos like Killer Croc, Man-Bat, and The Penguin to appear. Hugo Strange, maybe. This would be a pretty drastic change in tone from the "Batman: Life on the Streets" vibe of TDK, though.

RED HOOD

ventriloquist!!!!!1

red hood for the fourth movie, after they do robin?

I want the way they 'do' Robin in this cycle of films to be the equivalent of how The Incredibles handled Syndrome.

I don't like the Red Hood as Robin stuff. I like him pretty well as the Joker's origin story. Too late to worry about that for Ledgoker, but maybe the copycat idea I mentioned upthread could run with it.

To keep the policier tone and adapt a villain from the comics, perhaps a reworked so he's not so damn silly version of "The Wrath"?

Ten-Eyed Man Batman #226 (November 1970) Philip Reardon is a former Vietnam War veteran/warehouse guard who is blinded in a warehouse explosion that burns his retinas. Doctor Engstrom reconnects them to his fingers. Reardon blames Batman for his blindness. He is killed during the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

this guy will be the villain when guillermo del toro takes over batman.

and then there's this:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth? Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense -- values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right -- only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Mr. Klavan has won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. His new novel, "Empire of Lies" (An Otto Penzler Book, Harcourt), is about an ordinary man confronting the war on terror.

Very, very ordinary.

I saw that article, read the first paragraph and basically went "lol dumbass".

Meanwhile, Patrick Goldstein, Joe Morgenstern and the masses. Among other things:

Readers questioned Morgenstern's manhood ("What an old queen!"), taunted him ("Prepare to be roasted!!!") and hooted at his bad taste (" 'Mamma Mia' over 'TDK'? Seriously? Wow, what a tool"). But when a guy whose e-mail handle is Super Nazi Moses blows you off, saying, "You are a moron ... Burn in Hell," you really have to consider the source. After all, what you would expect Super Nazi Moses to say?

WWSNMD?

> what you would expect Super Nazi Moses to say?

Achtung, let my people go up up and away!

When I mentioned the movie doing what it could to get around the PG-13 rating, I didn't mean to sound too critical - I still found the movie quite effective and disturbing despite the lack of blood. I was just arguing that the the characters are definitely dead, despite the cutaways.

I thought the ending meant that Batman essentially DID take the rap for all the people Dent killed, as well as Dent being killed himself. If they really do bring back any of the dead characters it would really ruin the story retroactively.

this guy will be the villain when guillermo del toro takes over batman.
hahaha.

lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2yv8aT0UFc

Anyway, Charlie (the 11yo ^^^) loved this. Didn't think it was slow at all, and wasn't any more keen on WAU THAT BLOWED UP than DARK 'N' BROODY.

OH MY GOSH GUYS I JUST FOUND OUT AARON ECKHART IS MORMON

MORMANG

Moral -- do not dip your Mormons into gasoline.

Saw it again tonight. Theater = packed. This film might yet eat the world.

Re: That WSJ article:

What a weird comparison between George W Bush and Batman. I'm just stating the obvious here, but isn't the great dilemma for Batman in TDK that he refuses to kill anyone; even someone as heinous as the joker? And isn't there that scene where Harvey Dent is about to (maybe, sorta, kinda) torture the mentally handicapped guy and Batman stops him? How exactly does anyone reconcile the actual film with the Bush administration?

He didn't actually watch the film, did he.

wellll, imo the most interesting question in the movie is "is batman responsible for the existence and actions of the joker/two-face e.g. is america responsible for the existence and actions of rogue states/terrorists" and the movie then explicitly and repeatedly lets batman off the hook

Just saw it. Felt like being beaten with a tire iron for three and a half hours. Impressive, but not much fun. Politically loathesome. Kinda hated it. Re: Mordy -- Batman & Gordon = heroicized version of the Bush admin. Point you make about Batman's unwillingness to kill is fair, but it doesn't undermine the analogy, which was never exact to begin with. Cankles kinda OTM, but while the film does suggest that Batman/Gordon created the conditions that caused the Joker's "terrorism" (film's language) to be unleashed, their only sin is that they were too idealistic, too darn hungry for justice. Their overwhelming goodness necessitated a backlash.

so what's with the "fives" in this movie?

five bank robbers killed at the beginning
five deaths before batman turns himself in (i forget who says this to him)
five people killed by two face (as gordon says at the end, "five dead, two of them cops")

oh wait, joker says it to batman in interrogation: "You let five people die. THEN you let Dent take your place."

this was good as a superhero movie,(the post modern hero elements and the extremeness atmosphere of it) but the limitation of the genre and/or the hollywood cinematic cliches prevents it from being great.
also the "symbolism" of the relativeness of good,evil and power etc. is too explicit and over-written as the movie goes towards the end, and especially at the end itself.
Nolan and Ledger did a superb job here anyway, and it was totally entartaining nevertheless

i read all this yesterday a day or two after seeing the film. lots of interesting points. on a pedantic geek note - SPOILER:

i thought that the warehouse death was pretty definite - rather than a cutaway there was a brief i guess cgi thing where the body/face was momentarily consumed by flames, illuminated. i don't think there's any way or purpose for the character coming back, anyway, when all logic dictates it would have been recovered, and there wouldn't have been a conspiratorial element to the death, especially given that it was already part of a trick.

but the film was great, and i hated the first batman film, it being a montage of au courant earnest boring martial arts shit and unexciting villains.

I have far too much nervous energy right now to sit and write a full out post on this, but here's a few thoughts:

- I loved the opening bank sequence. Such a bold, detached and totally brilliant operation. Death? Sure. But kill the guy who is an employee of the guys I want to give me license to run amok in Gotham? He doesn't leave any of the insiders alive, and his escape would ONLY work if timed perfectly. By the time the cops figure out he's driving a BUS during morning rush hour with 8 other buses, he'll be out of the bus and gone. And the nodding to the "Isn't he out?" was great.

- Damn. Ledger's Joker was...astounding. The hunched over shoulders at the beginning of the movie when he's picked up at the street corner, and again when he's staring down Bats on his Batcycle - total Big Boy from Dick Tracy. He's clearly fucked up in a very core, operating system sort of way. But he's smart and imaginative enough to be able to out think almost everybody, and when that doesn't work, he really has not problem killing people.

- I took the varied scar-origin stories to be him covering for something, or maybe an amalgamation of what his brain thinks led to the scars being there - like, his dad was a drunk and a fiend, but his ACTIONS put the scars there, not his knife.

- I tend to make bold calls when nothing is at stake, and I avoided all press between the first weekend's Rotten Tomatoes score and this morning because I didn't want to know how it ended. My prediction about the third movie: Maggie Gyllenhal returns for the third movie. As Catwoman.

- I think one guy not getting enough credit was Eric Roberts. His character was AWESOME. Total sleaze...total Eric Roberts...but really neat how, from very early on, he knows to just get the fuck out of the Joker's way. Like "My name's Paul, and I ain't getting shot!"

- Bale was Bale, only having less fun that he often seems to have. I always find, in all of his characters, a sense of real mischief in Bale's characters - "I know I shouldn't be doing this, but..." In that regard, he fit right in. His relationships with Alfred and Lucius were strained, and their witty banter was...covering for something.

Felt very overwhelmed by this movie - could have been the late night show I saw (I'm an early to bed guy), but more than likely the movie itself and its pretty unrelenting, long, sometimes-brutal story was something to get through. Still, I enjoyed it.

My comment to a friend about this movie was this:

Dude - when Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are splitting Yoda duties, you really have to work to fuck the thing up.

unrelenting is a great word to describe this flick - i had to piss like 5 minutes in & kept waiting for some kindve break. i left the second the hong kong sequence ended (boring chinese dude was getting interrogated it looked like), i think if indeed picked a good window that was about the only one. what a great movie.

I want to see it a third time, and have a free ticket, but IT'S STILL "NO PASSES ALLOWED" AT MY LOCAL THEATRE...COME ONNNNNNNN!

300M O_O

i know like 3 people whove already seen this 3 times, it is the new titanic

Movie's already made like $350M.

Not domestically -- they're figuring close to $320 million after today -- but it'll almost certainly hit that during this week.

worldwide, at least.

Just seen this - really loved it. It had everything.

SPOILERZ

i really need to see this again, especially the bit about saving harvey or rachel! i thought it was a head-fake of the movie to let us believe batman was after rachel, and really picking dent, not a trick of the joker's. hmmmm

Yeah, I thought this too, so did the people I went with. Batman seemed to have as much reason to want to save Dent (= Dent will save world, he can stop being Batman) as the girl. Not sure why they didn't send half the police squad to each.

It *was* fun, I can't understand why you wouldn't find fun in this film. Just loads and loads of awesome scenes. But I was surprised at the level of violence (mainly implied, but unnervingly effectively) for a 12A. e.g. the knives in mouths, pencil thing.

I might be naive but one of the refreshing things about this was that some cliches were often touched on but avoided e.g. joker's 'violent daddy' story - seems too silly and oddly placed for it to be anything other than a 'joke' (which it later reveals itself to be) but in another film this would have been a serious plot point. Also, the long shots of him in the prison cell with the shattered mirror shards behind him - leaving you to reach your own conclusions about exactly what would happen next, without feeling the need to then show you him using them. (Stupid plot point here, with the one guy guarding the room).

I was expecting some massive Joker mind-fuck on the ferry scenes. Joker was always two steps ahead of everyone throughout the film then let this big plan hinge on other people (granted, he did have his own detonators). The ferry scenes played out slightly weirdly. I was putting myself in the position of the "good" guy who was going to detonate but couldn't - and what would have been screaming in my head was 'he is a JOKER, yr not really gonna get blown up at midnight/the detonators really blow up kittens' etc. But it seemed like everyone on both ferries took the Joker seriously and the guy just 'bottled' because he couldn't be that guy. Also there would be riots before anyone could even hand out the voting papers, so I was bemused that there was enough order to all politely vote and then count up the votes while SECONDS TICKING TO DOOOOMMM.

Kept expecting Rachel to pop up all alive as we never saw her dead. Dent did have a few shots at the end were he was lying dead still though, right? Dent's scene with the Gordon family was the only slight let-down - pretty sudden character change there, holding a gun to a kid's head.

Oh! And one of the mob baddies was out of Lucas + Walliams 90s boyband spoof, Boyz Unlimited, which along with Alpert from Lost and Agent Whatever from Prison Break pretty much made the movie for me.

i saw it for the 2nd time last night. it *was* a trick on the part of the joker: he says: "he's at 250 52nd street, and she's at avenue x". gordon asks "where are you going" and batman says "rachel!". dent tells his men to converge on 250 52nd street, but when they get there, it's of course rachel in the warehouse and not dent.

i was surprised that nobody on the "upright citizens" boat was willing to think about all of the national guardsmen, police and transit workers on the other boat!!

sorry, "gordon tells his men". i still have the problem of calling him harvey dent instead of gordon. because all harveys have walrus mustaches.

i want a pair of commissioner gordon glasses. anybody know what brand they are? they look sorta YSL but i doubt they'd pick YSL glasses for a guy like that.

as far as plot points go, i assumed the 'joke' in the last bit was that each detonator actually triggered its own boat, not sure if there was anything to contradict that

Did no-one else expect that the Joker had actually been sneaky and given them the detonators to their own boats but told them the opposite? I was expecting that to be the case and for the boat of "good people" to blow themselves up.

I thought this, and also that he would turn out to not even have a detonator to blow them both up with, such was his confidence that one of them would do it

Lots of subtle little Joker moments of greatness eg "I believe in Harvey Dent" sticker on the nurses' uniform, that awkward "....hi" as his opening greeting to the horrendously disfigured Dent, and particularly his surrendering his massive collection of knives upon his first arrest and sheepishly throwing down a potato peeler at the end

"Let me get this straight; you're saying that your client, who is one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, spends his evenings brutalising criminals with his bare fists, and you are intending to blackmail him...?"

Was this supposed to be like "that is too far fetched for anyone to believe?" At this stage it seemed like people wanted to know who Batman was and a guy was very rich and had a lot of spare time might seem like a good shout, coming from a guy who worked for him and had like lovingly rendered pencil drawings of the Batmobile taken from his Applied Sciences department

if he was just saying like "if you out Batman he will straight batter you son" then that would be OK I suppose

i think it was the 2nd