Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

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

it was def the latter, as i understood it - this guy is not only the ultimate badass as far as asskickings are concerned, but he could also buy you & just about anyone else on earth 700 thousand times over. blackmail away.

didn't quite get why Batz picking Harvey or Rachel should've made that much difference, was it just because the Batmobile would've got there faster than regular ol' Police or something? Rachel being unexpectedly incinerated mid-sentence was kind of jarring even though some dickhead had already posted about her dying

I thought it was really great but by the time we're like 2hrs 25 in, the unpleasant death count's at about 400 and Harvey's holding a gun up to a child's head and making his dad have a conversation with him before he shoots him it was getting a bit like, take it easy, man

think pinefox's first long post is pretty spot on mostly

did feel like it was a bit of a leap in logic to go "I need to take the blame for all this and become a pretend villain", when the Joker was obviously more to blame for the Dent killings than Batman, but I must just've been lost to the subtleties after 150 minutes of Intensity

Also probably couldn't stomach a rewatching to clarify this stuff anytime too soon, even though Heef's bits kind of make me wish I could

I must just've been lost to the subtleties after 150 minutes of Intensity

I uh, might just have been a bit confused, rather

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!!

This crossed my mind on the second viewing as well! (There are a few ways to answer this, I figure.)

Never fear: the Noble Black Felon made the choice for them.

hahahaaha

The Other Shawshank Redemption

I am thinking maybe they didn't SHOW Rachel dead bcz to show whatever the hell was left of her would push it most defs into the R rating I'm still astonished it avoided. I thought it was pretty clear she was damn fucking dead, but OTOH I am the person that read all Tolkein's books thinking the Baggins were named "Bib-lo" and "Ford-o."

A renaming which would be utterly wonderful.

And yeah, she dead. I gather Emma Thomas, Nolan's wife and producer of his films, has said Harvey's death is meant to be more ambiguous.

that awkward "....hi" as his opening greeting to the horrendously disfigured Dent

haha yes! I saw it again a couple of days ago and cracked up so much at this bit. He looked for all the world like Dent's concerned mum trying to tell him his puppy had died.

was waiting for him to show him his own face for the first time and complete his descent insanity

what is Harvey supposed to have died from, falling 15 feet? Wasn't entirely clear what had happened but it never occurred to me at any point that he wasn't mostly being set up as the main guy in the next one, and felt that they were shooting their wad on it a bit by cramming so much intense stuff with him into the last 10 minutes of an already exhausting ending

like, he was all consumed with the need for revenge but he stopped to make one half of his suit jacket into some sequinned Ric Flair shit, surely that could've waited

I took that look as being what happened to his suit after the car crash when he took out Eric Roberts' driver. A tasteful distressing, at least.

And yeah on the '...hi' moment too as being the one that hit me the most second time around -- but the 'puppy dog out of the police car window' bit dug in even deeper.

I'm waiting for someone to say they hated this, so I can get revved up again...

[A huge still from the 'puppy dog' bit here BTW.]

I wasn't that crazy about it! Pick me! Pick me!

I think my brother stated my opinions perfectly: "Maybe if Joker was still listening to Prince, the movie wouldn't have been as oppressive."

some other things i noticed the 2nd time around

1) when eric roberts goes to get in the car with his driver and bodyguard you can see dent's arms reach out of the shadows on the left side of the screen and pull the bodyguard off-camera. a real quick flash.

2) is it just me or was alan ruck (cameron from ferris bueller) on the boat at the end?

3) who was the truck driver from the car chase scene? the one with the joker? he looked very familiar.

movies are oppressive

A number of the more understated performances felt stronger second time through -- Gary Oldman's in particular (no surprise, I loved him in the first film, best performance easy, but he holds his own better than I remembered first time through -- I'm thinking of the interrogation room scene with the Joker as a prime example).

Why you being all grumpy-beared out, deez? All walkin' up to the pencil sharpener with your sharp pencil for an excuse to yank my pigtails again?

im not being grumpy, im saying thats a massive part of why i love this movie! as i said upthread

nothing to do w/ yr pigtails or my pencil

haha re Prince: i honestly wanted Ledger to do a Joker version of his performance of "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" from 10 Things I Hate About You.

Gary Oldman was aces and Gordon easily my favourite character from both movies. I love the subtle change in his character between the two movies - the weary idealist cop now newly-energized and given a purpose. The old Gordon could never have jumped to the Mayor's defense the way he did, dude could barely operate a Batmobile.