Saw The Dark Knight this afternoon. I would get a lot of shit for this if anyone actually read this blog, but Batman Begins is a better movie which I like the most between the two.
Or should I say, three.
To contain my Batcitement (going to see this film made me actually feel happy–such a rare and alien feeling) I bought the animated Batman movie Gotham Knight and watched it the night before.
Gotham Knight (which could also be called Batman 2.5) features 6 loosely connected stories, some referencing events of Batman Begins. It’s beautifully animated and well-written; any Bat Fan is bound to love at least two of the segments and enjoy the rest.
But back to The Dark Knight. Fanboys are claiming the role of The Joker drove Heath Ledger “insane” or pushed him over the edge….it’s an idiotic urban legend that’s taken on a life of its own and will probably be with us for decades. Ledger was no more made insane by this role than he was turned gay by Brokeback Mountain.
Is Ledger’s Joker Oscar-worthy? It’s a moot question due to the tragedy of the circumstances. I thought it was an excellent performance for a rather limited character. A better question would be “Does anyone give a shit about the Oscars any more?”
Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent was equally good as was Gary Oldman’s James Gordon, and Bale, of course, IS Batman. I’m in the camp that thinks that Maggie Gyllenhal–so hot in her weird way–is an improvement over Katie “Xenu” Holmes.
With hundreds of extras running around, Gotham doesn’t have the dark, claustrophobic feel it did in the first movie and is therefore less of a “character.” That’s a minor gripe. The more serious (“Why…so…SERIOUS?”) problems I had with The Dark Knight were unfortunately recurring: its exceeding length, suspense build-ups that tarry and about halfway through all the characters are “endumbened” as they often are in horror movies, in order to move the story along. Without giving anything away, much of the Joker’s evil plans involve infiltration, but there’s a marked lack of checking and double-checking credentials. “Cop A” climbs into a vehicle with “Cop B” whom he’s never seen before and doesn’t think twice about it. It does get tedious, but as the box office shows, curmudgeons like me aren’t going to stop what may end up being the biggest movie of all time.
Until next summer.
Tags: 2008 Oscars, Aaron Eckhart, Alfred, animated Batman, Bat Fans, Bat signal, Batcitement, Batman, Batman Begins, Batmobile, Batpod, biggest movie of all time, Brokeback Mountain, Bruce Wayne, Christian Bale, curmudgeonry, endumbened, fake butter, fanboys, Gary Oldman, GCPD, Gotham City, Gotham Knight, Harvey Dent, heath ledger, James Gordon, Katie Holmes, Lucius Fox, Maggie Gyllenhal, meatlights39, moot questions, movie reviews, Oscars irrelevant, posthumous Oscars, Rachel Dawes, Some men just want to watch the world burn, summer blockbusters, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight sucked, The Joker, the Oscars suck, urban legends, Why so serious?, xenu
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Saturday, 2 August 2008 at 5:06 pm |
Me and Todd went and saw it at noon. I thought it sucked compared to the first one. Todd, who never saw BATMAN BEGINS, didn’t think very much of it either.
This one was too noisy, too complicated and had Eric Roberts (who the fuck cast, being that his “career” washed up 20 years ago) in it playing a lame ass mafioso, the exact opposite of Tony Soprano or Al Pacino as the Godfather. In other words, a weak pussy. Batman did his thing and I thought the special effects for “Two Face” was cool.
Another complaint. We didn’t see enough of The Joker and it wasn’t as bloody as I’d thought it’d be based on the reviews I read of it prior to seeing the thing.
However, I rented DOOMSDAY, a movie that came out this year that I can’t remember if it played in theaters or not, that ROCKED like crazy, a British-made film that mixed in MAD MAX, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and HIGHLANDER, among others, together. A big beautiful soup of anything and everything. It was a great paean to those films and others. The blood and gore was FANTASTIC and it should have been, considering the title of the movie.
One scene shows this maniac’s head flying off of his neck and goes straight into the camera, from a long distance so you get time to appreciate it, and all the while the head is screaming bloody death until it’s final impact into the face of the camera. And it was a guy you wanted to see die too. So he got a good comeuppance, which was satisfying for this viewer.
And a HOT HOT BRITISH CHICK had the lead role. And it was a low budget production, you find this out by watching the three excellent DVD extras, and so these dudes used their imaginations, instead of having plenty of bank to let graphic artists, create each super cool stunt, this movie is non-stop action, it moves from the get go. No love story shit in it too, which, in my book, counts way up high on the list of horror/sci-fi/action movie no-nos.
DOOMSDAY is plain, aggressive survival of the fittest and plenty of gore-filled death.
Hell, I still haven’t taken it back to Blockbuster so I’ll watch it again.
Oh, the scene where one of the MAD MAX babes gets an arrow through her skull? Fucking genius. Her acting as a dead person was BRAVO! in my book.
Okay, THE DARK KNIGHT: unfulfilled and not enough of The Joker or how he does the shit he does. He just creates chaos yet we’re never tuned into that. It’s always Batman, Commission Gorden, Maggie “Maybe The Most Butt Ugly Terrible Actresses On Movie Screens EVER” Gyllenhaal or Two-Face on the screen.
BUT it did leave an opening for another BATMAN, and it will be made for sure due to the incredible box office haul it’s made (ironic considering in one scene you see so much money in one spot at one time you can’t take your eyes off that bounty of moolah, and The Joker…oh that’s enough. I won’t spoil it for ya.
Saturday, 2 August 2008 at 11:34 pm |
Yeah, I laughed at the money.