Batman carries on beginning in ... The Dark Knight

Right – Denby (and others) are quibbling with Nolan's conceptions.

"Tim Burton’s original conception"

-- Pancakes Hackman, Monday, 14 July 2008 13:57 (1 hour ago) Link

^ this

i tried to watch the 1989 batman a few years ago and i couldn't get through it.

fuck david denby, pretty much

xp: You won't be able to get through this one in 20 years either, if you're lucky.

you saw?

He doesn't need to see it!

I kind of want to buy the Burton Batman on DVD but I have a dreadful feeling that I'd hate it now. I've got the animated series to watch which will hopefully gimme a decent Batman fix.

He doesn't need to see it!

that's our morbs! http://www.booleansoup.com/images/emoticons/eyeroll.gif

I bought the Batman box set that was out a few years ago. Some of the Burton stuff still works, some doesn't, there's some atrocious editing and the plot in the first one is still a bit wispy. Keaton better than I remember. And the shields on the Batmobile are hand-drawn animation! As is Joker falling to his death! (WHOOPS SPOILERS)

"Batman: Gotham Knight" has some really, really good stuff. For all of Marvel's box office success lately, DC owns the animation ground.

i always thought "gotham" was chicago and "metropolis" was n.y. but maybe i have it backwards?

-- moonship journey to baja, Monday, July 14, 2008 6:38 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Link

it looks like i do have it backwards!

-- moonship journey to baja, Monday, July 14, 2008 6:40 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Link

!!! i have always assumed same all my assumptions have been upbraided

gotham has been a nyc nickname for 200 years or something, right?

The origins of 'Gotham' as a nickname.

actually wait i thought both were ny

So, uh, was trying to get tickets to see this on the IMAX screen here in Chicago... but apparently every showing for the entire run is already sold out.

-- jon /via/ chi 2.0, Monday, July 14, 2008 7:52 AM (Monday, July 14, 2008 7:52 AM) Bookmark Link

dang, was gonna look into this after lunch today. i want to see them blow up the brachs candy factory on the big big screen.

fwiw i thought metropolis was supposed to be located on the eastern seaboard circa annapolis?? though the daily planet building from the original supes t.v. show is located in providence, ri

I forget who said it - Julie Schwartz or someone probably - "Metropolis is NYC in the daytime, Gotham City is NYC at night."

jvc, i just went to the imax @ navy pier website and there are still tix available for opening weekend (though only the 3 and 6 am showings) and tickets for ALL showings the next weekend.

No spoilers and I guess I don't even have to say it but this movie ROCKED. Heath Ledger, dammmmnnn. I don't know about Oscar-worthy, but it was something-worthy alright.

Big gripe, same as the last movie: music was awful.

And please if you can, see it on an Imax screen. I saw it on a regular screen and it was disorienting enough, I can't imagine how unsettling it must be on Imax.

metropolis is toronto

Holy Crap!

jvc, i just went to the imax @ navy pier website and there are still tix available for opening weekend (though only the 3 and 6 am showings) and tickets for ALL showings the next weekend.

Yeah, we found this out yesterday when my wife stopped by after work. The moron I talked to over the weekend just had no clue, and their website was down.

I have two tickets to a preview screening (in the UK) next Wednesday night. EXCITED.

So excited that over the last four days I've watched Batman Begins, Gotham Knight, and seven episodes of the animated series first season.

I've got an advance ticket for this at the IMAX on Thursday night...

What's the deal with preview screenings? I don't understand how it can be so easy to get in to see a film before its general release?

If you so much as walk aimlessly around certain malls (especially in big cities) there will be people who are giving out, if not actively harassing you to take, free screening passes. The last two movies I was directly offered passes to I turned down and they both, ironically, were gigantic hits (Borat and Knocked Up).

If you register at seefilmfirst, you'll get emails offering you tickets for preview screenings. It works on a first come first serve basis though, so there's no guarantee that you'll actually get a seat even if you've got a ticket. I've seen loads of pretty good films this way though.

list and map of chicago shooting locations for the dark knight.

this one is my favorite because they blew up the fucking parking garage (kitted to look like a hospital in the movie i think) and didn't tell any of the neighbors. the explosion and 10 story fireball scared the hell out of much of the west side.

What's the deal with preview screenings?

I have a Visa credit card and received some rewards-type e-mail last week offering free advance tickets. I hope they're for real and that I won't return home to find my apartment ransacked.

Kenneth Turan approves.

(Though he somehow forgets that the 'next film' Nolan did was The Prestige.)

Also, a soundtrack review.

Armond let'er rip:

Aaron Eckhart’s cop role in The Black Dahlia humanized the complexity of crime and morality. But as Harvey Dent, sorrow transforms him into the vengeful Two-Face, another Armageddon freak in Nolan’s sideshow. The idea is that Dent proves heroism is improbable or unlikely in this life. Dent says, “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” What kind of crap is that to teach our children, or swallow ourselves? Such illogic sums up hipster nihilism, just like Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World. Putting that crap in a Batman movie panders to the naiveté of those who have not outgrown the moral simplifications of old comics but relish cynicism as smartness. That’s the point of The Joker telling Batman, “You complete me.” Tim Burton might have ridiculed that Jerry Maguire canard, but Nolan means it—his hero is as sick as his villain.

Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children—which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson’s ’89 Joker. Nicholson’s disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger’s Joker (sweaty clown’s make-up to cover his Black Dahlia–style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh—fashionable icons of modern irrational fear. The Joker’s escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens—to spook excitable kids. Ledger’s already-overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place?

Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan’s unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses. Nolan’s single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker’s psychobabble: “Madness, as you know, is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.” The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push.

But is it art?

didn't see that coming

Wait, hold on:

Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization

This phrase should not exist.

^^^^for realz. that sentence is completely backwards.

why does Armond have a job?

Denby and now White - I'm beginning to wish Pauline Kael had never been born.

major lolz

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/sexymollusk/ironicnotfunny/whitelolz.jpg

I had no idea Armond White was an old bald black guy. for some reason I had this mental picture of him as stereotypical ivory-tower-living old white liberal dude.

That graphic is hilarious...and White's blurb is the best written.

i know, so many levels of funny

That graphic is hilarious...and White's blurb is the best written.

sad but true

I need to tell heave ho about Victoria Alexander

I don't know. I'm totally anxious to see this, and I'm not often interested in big-budget Hollywood movies. But I wonder when I read praise like this:

This film, and to a lesser degree “Iron Man,” redefine the possibilities of the “comic-book movie.”

“The Dark Knight” is not a simplistic tale of good and evil. Batman is good, yes, The Joker is evil, yes. But Batman poses a more complex puzzle than usual: The citizens of Gotham City are in an uproar, calling him a vigilante and blaming him for the deaths of policemen and others. And the Joker is more than a villain. He’s a Mephistopheles whose actions are fiendishly designed to pose moral dilemmas for his enemies.

Roger Ebert's Review. I've read this over-and-over in other reviews. But none of this is new. It's the same key conflict at the heart of a lot of comic-book movies, e.g., the first Batman franchise; Spiderman. The hero is often a haunted vigilante who teeters on the edge of good and evil; The villian often is a rouge monster who challenges the hero's (self-)identity as virtuous. There's more to Ebert's review, to be sure (including a lengthy discussion of what looks like the best thing about the movie: It's hypercool feel and Ledger's performance), but there's something that rings hollow about all the reviews saying that the plotline and the characters' internal struggles "raise the bar" for comic book movies.

Anyone seen it yet? Is there something to this notion that the movie takes "comic book films" to a newer, deeper place?

“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore.

RUH ROH!!!!