The Dark Knight

[MovieWes]

"That's how reluctant Oscar voters are to hug the dead," O'Neil said. "These awards are all about hugs and there's something creepy about embracing the dead."

I think this is the weirdest thing that Tom O'Neil has ever said.



Edited By MovieWes on 1216330776

[Zahveed]

Oscar watchers dampen award hype for Ledger's Joker
Wednesday July 16 3:59 PM ET


When the new Batman movie "The Dark Night" began screenings last month before its U.S. debut on Friday, some moviegoers saw Heath Ledger as an instant Oscar candidate as the deranged villain, The Joker.

But Oscar watchers and veteran critics say the joke may be on fans creating mostly Internet-based buzz because an Academy Award for the Australian actor, who died of an accidental drug overdose in January, would be a rare event.

Only one actor has won an Oscar after death, Peter Finch for 1976's "Network."

"Dark Knight" is the type of comic book, action adventure that Oscar voters generally do not favor and there are many movies to see later this year, the experts said.

Still, Ledger's critically hailed performance may bring a nomination for the U.S. film industry's top award, to be presented next on February 22, 2009.

"All this Oscar talk is a phenomenon of the Internet age that I like to call 'a wish-fulfillment rumor.' If people say it often enough, they think it will happen," said Leonard Maltin, film critic for TV program "Entertainment Tonight."

"That's not to say it might not happen," he said, citing a "great performance" by Ledger. "But I assure you that the people who are spreading all this are neither Oscar voters nor (Hollywood) movers and shakers."

Tom O'Neil, a columnist for award-watching Web site The Envelope.com, said "it really looks good" for a nomination but was "a long shot" to win.

Hollywood has a long history of seeing big stars -- James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Bruce Lee among them -- appearing in high-profile films released after their untimely deaths.

O'Neil said that when Finch died, Hollywood was in the middle of Oscar season and also in shock. Prior to that, Robert De Niro was sweeping the critics' awards for "Taxi Driver."

Veteran Oscar watcher O'Neil also sees parallels between the truncated careers of Ledger and James Dean.

"Like Heath, James Dean was a heartthrob star who was considered a serious actor, who died tragically young," O'Neil said. "He was nominated twice posthumously, for "East of Eden" and "Giant," and he lost both times."

Even the legendary Spencer Tracy was ignored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the Oscars, after he died in 1967 just as "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?" was coming. And he was the front-runner, O'Neil said.

Tracy's co-star Katharine Hepburn did win best actress for "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?"

"That's how reluctant Oscar voters are to hug the dead," O'Neil said. "These awards are all about hugs and there's something creepy about embracing the dead."

(Editing by Bob Tourtellotte and John O'Callaghan)

[Sabin]

Nobody commented on my post a couple months ago re: Armond White's blistering essay on what movies should be, which is a little wrong-headed by still totally engrossing. He presents a dissenting view on 'The Dark Knight'.

(just a cribs sheet primer:
'The Black Dahlia' - good!
'There Will Be Blood' - bad!
'Batman' - good!
'Hellboy 2' - bad!
'Batman Returns' - good!
'Zodiac' - bad!
..you don't have to agree, but Armond's cinematic moral compass is on display like very few other contemporary critics.)

KNIGHT TO REMEMBER
Christopher Nolan panders to hip, nihilistic tendencies, forgetting that superheroes are also meant to inspire hope

By Armond White

Every generation has a right to its own Batman. Every generation also has the right—no, obligation—to question a pop-entertainment that diminishes universal ideas of good, evil, social purpose and pleasure. And Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, is a highly questionable pop enterprise. Forty-two-year-old movie lovers can’t tell 21-year-old movie lovers why; 21 can only know by getting to be 42. But I’ll try.

After announcing his new comics interpretation with 2005’s oppressively grim Batman Begins, Nolan continues the intellectual squalor popularized in his pseudo-existential hit Memento. Appealing to adolescent jadedness and boredom, Nolan revamps millionaire Bruce Wayne’s transformation into the crime-fighter Batman (played by indie-zombie Christian Bale), by making him a twisted icon, what the kids call “sick.” The Dark Knight is not an adventure movie with a driven protagonist; it’s a goddamn psychodrama in which Batman/Bruce Wayne’s neuroses compete with two alter-egos: Gotham City’s law-and-order District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), and master criminal The Joker (Heath Ledger)—all three personifying the contemporary distrust of virtue.

We’re way beyond film noir here. The Dark Knight has no black-and-white moral shading. Everything is dark, the tone glibly nihilistic (hip) due to The Joker’s rampage that brings Gotham City to its knees—exhausting the D.A. and nearly wearing-out Batman’s arsenal of expensive gizmos. Nolan isn’t interested in providing James Bond–style gadgetry for its own ingenious wonder; rather, these crime battle accoutrements evoke Zodiac-style “process” (part of the futility and dread exemplified by the constantly outwitted police). This pessimism links Batman to our post-9/11 anxiety by escalating the violence quotient, evoking terrorist threat and urban helplessness. And though the film’s violence is hard, loud and constant, it is never realistic—it fabricates disaster simply to tease millennial death wish and psychosis.

Watching psychic volleys between Batman, Dent and The Joker (there’s even a love quadrangle that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal’s slouchy Assistant D.A., Rachel Dawes) is as fraught and unpleasurable as There Will Be Blood with bat wings. This sociological bloodsport shouldn’t be acceptable to any thinking generation.

There hasn’t been so much pressure to like a Batman movie since street vendors were selling bootleg Batman T-shirts in 1989. If blurbs like “The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil—expected to do battle—decide instead to get it on and dance” sound desperate, it’s due to the awful tendency to convert criticism into ad copy—constantly pandering to Hollywood’s teen demographic. This not only revamps ideas of escapist entertainment; like Nolan, it corrupts them.

Remember how Tim Burton’s 1989 interpretation of the comics superhero wasn’t quite good enough? Yet Burton attempted something dazzling: a balance of scary/satirical mood (which he nearly perfected in the 1992 Batman Returns) that gave substance to a pop-culture totem, enhancing it without sacrificing its delight. Burton didn’t need to repeat the tongue-in-cheek 1960s TV series; being romantically in touch with Catwoman, Bruce Wayne and The Penguin’s loneliness was richer. Burton’s pop-geek specialty is to humorously explicate childhood nightmare. But Nolan’s The Dark Knight has one note: gloom. For Nolan, making Batman somber is the same as making it serious. This is not a triumph of comics culture commanding the mainstream: It’s giving in to bleakness. Ever since Frank Miller’s 1986 graphic-novel reinvention, The Dark Knight Returns, pop consumers have rejected traditional moral verities as corny. That might be the ultimate capitalist deception.

A bleak Batman entraps us in a commercial mechanism, not art. There’s none of Burton’s satirical detachment from the crime-and-punishment theme. In Nolan’s view, crime is never punished or expunged. (“I am an agent of chaos!” boasts The Joker.) The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can’t see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight’s dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product.

Ironically, Nolan’s aggressive style won’t be slagged “manipulative” because it doesn’t require viewers to feel those discredited virtues, “hope” and “faith.” Like Hellboy II, this kind of sci-fi or horror or comics-whatever obviates morality. It trashes belief systems and encourages childish fantasies of absurd macho potency and fabulous grotesqueries. That’s how Nolan could take the fun out of Batman and still be acclaimed hip. As in Memento, Nolan shows rudimentary craft; his zeitgeist filmmaking—morose, obsessive, fussily executed yet emotionally unsatisfying—will only impress anyone who hasn’t seen De Palma’s genuinely, politically serious crime-fighter movie, The Black Dahlia.

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.

[MovieWes]

The Dark Knight (PG-13) ****

// / July 16, 2008

By Roger Ebert

“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. 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.

The key performance in the movie is by the late Heath Ledger, as the Joker. Will he become the first posthumous Oscar winner since Peter Finch? His Joker draws power from the actual inspiration of the character in the silent classic “The Man Who Laughs” (1928). His clown's makeup more sloppy than before, his cackle betraying deep wounds, he seeks revenge, he claims, for the horrible punishment his father exacted on him when he was a child. In one diabolical scheme near the end of the film, he invites two ferry-loads of passengers to blow up the other before they are blown up themselves. Throughout the film, he devises ingenious situations that force Batman (Christian Bale), Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to make impossible ethical decisions. By the end, the whole moral foundation of the Batman legend is threatened.

Because these actors and others are so powerful, and because the movie does not allow its spectacular special effects to upstage the humans, we’re surprised how deeply the drama affects us. Eckhart does an especially good job as Harvey Dent, whose character is transformed by a horrible fate into a bitter monster. It is customary in a comic book movie to maintain a certain knowing distance from the action, to view everything through a sophisticated screen. “The Dark Knight” slips around those defenses and engages us.

Yes, the special effects are extraordinary. They focus on the expected explosions and catastrophes, and have some superb, elaborate chase scenes. The movie was shot on location in Chicago, but it avoids such familiar landmarks as Marina City, the Wrigley Building or the skyline. Chicagoans will recognize many places, notably La Salle Street and Lower Wacker Drive, but director Nolan is not making a travelogue. He presents the city as a wilderness of skyscrapers, and a key sequence is set in the still-uncompleted Trump Tower. Through these heights, the Batman moves at the end of strong wires, or sometimes actually flies, using his cape as a parasail.

The plot involves nothing more or less than the Joker’s attempts to humiliate the forces for good and expose Batman’ secret identity, showing him to be a poser and a fraud. He includes Gordon and Dent on his target list, and contrives cruel tricks to play with the fact that Bruce Wayne once loved, and Harvey Dent now loves, Assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The tricks are more cruel than he realizes, because the Joker doesn’t know Batman’s identity. Heath Ledger has a good deal of dialogue in the movie, and a lot of it isn’t the usual jabs and jests we’re familiar with: It’s psychologically more complex, outlining the dilemmas he has constructed, and explaining his reasons for them. The screenplay by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan (who first worked together on “Memento”) has more depth and poetry than we might have expected.

Two of the supporting characters are crucial to the action, and are played effortlessly by the great actors Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. Freeman, as the scientific genius Lucius Fox, is in charge of Bruce Wayne’s underground headquarters, and makes an ethical objection to a method of eavesdropping on all of the citizens of Gotham City. His stand has current political implictions. Caine is the faithful butler Alfred, who understands Wayne better than anybody, and makes a decision about a crucial letter.

Nolan also directed the previous, and excellent, “Batman Begins” (2005), which went into greater detail than ever before about Bruce Wayne’s origins and the reasons for his compulsions. Now it is the Joker’s turn, although his past is handled entirely with dialogue, not flashbacks. There are no references to Batman’s childhood, but we certainly remember it, and we realize that this conflict is between two adults who were twisted by childhood cruelty — one compensating by trying to do good, the other by trying to do evil. Perhaps they instinctively understand that themselves.

Something fundamental seems to be happening in the upper realms of the comic-book movie. “Spider-Man II” (2004) may have defined the high point of the traditional film based on comic-book heroes. A movie like the new “Hellboy II” allows its director free rein for his fantastical visions. But now “Iron Man” and even more so “The Dark Knight” move the genre into deeper waters. They realize, as some comic-book readers instinctively do, that these stories touch on deep fears, traumas, fantasies and hopes. And the Batman legend, with its origins in film noir, is the most fruitful one for exploration.

In his two Batman movies, Nolan has freed the character to be a canvas for a broader scope of human emotion. For Bruce Wayne is a deeply troubled man, let there be no doubt, and if ever in exile from his heroic role, it would not surprise me what he finds himself capable of doing.

[MovieWes]

Oh, by the way, there are some MASSIVE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.


Joke’s On Us: Nolan’s Noir Is Gloomy Echo of New York in 2008

Christopher Nolan’s second Batman flick captures our fears and weaknesses, and spares a saccharine superhero ending. He’s called the Dark Knight for a reason!

by Andrew Sarris | July 15, 2008

THE DARK KNIGHT
RUNNING TIME 152 minutes
WRITTEN BY Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan
DIRECTED BY Christopher Nolan
STARRING Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Michael Caine, Aaron Eckhart, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman and Morgan Freeman

Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, from a screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer, is, of course, ultimately from a series of comic books published by DC Comics, with the creation of the Batman character attributed to Bob Kane. In the world of comic-book superheroes, the Batman franchise has specialized in the most eccentrically colorful villains. I still remember Michael Keaton’s Bruce Wayne/Batman character looking out of the corner of his eye at Jack Nicholson’s clownish antics as the Joker in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman, the second such cinematic transfer after Laslia Martinson’s 1966 Batman, with Adam West reprising in a campy fashion his hit television role. I remember also Milton Berle’s smirking at the idea of Batman’s “Ward,” Robin (played by Burt Ward), by pursing his lips as he pronounced “Ward.” The comically homophobic Berle also had fun with the name “Bruce.” Anyway, Robin is nowhere to be found in this new ultra-adult version running some 152 minutes and aptly titled The Dark Knight. Indeed, Mr. Nolan’s is a darker and more nihilistic Batman than any of the other six previous forays into the illuminated night sky of Gotham City, with such other Bruce Wayne/Batman impersonators, besides Mr. West and Mr. Keaton, as Val Kilmer, George Clooney and, in Mr. Nolan’s first Batman film, Batman Begins (2005), Christian Bale. Mr. Bale continues in The Dark Knight along with such other cast members from Batman Begins as Gary Oldman as Lieutenant Jim Gordon; Michael Caine as Batman’s major-domo and father figure, Alfred; and Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, Bruce Wayne’s business adviser and facilitator.

As it happens, there are three additions to the cast that lift the film into the artistic stratosphere. First and foremost is the late Heath Ledger as the Joker; he transfigures this traditionally villainous role with a ghostly grandeur that has already impelled some journalists to look up the short roster of posthumous Oscar winners, though in this instance it should be for a lead role rather than a supporting one. Almost as impressive are Aaron Eckhart as the crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel Dawes, Dent’s legal assistant, who’s torn emotionally between her employer and Bruce Wayne/Batman, with whom she has had a long-term relationship.

What is most unprecedented about the narrative, however, is its largely unsympathetic treatment of the yapping and yowling citizens of Gotham City, a gloomy echo of ourselves, at the gas pumps and grocery stores, still looking for easy answers from the highest bidders for our votes. In this respect, Ledger’s Joker brilliantly incarnates the devil in all our miserable souls as we contemplate a world seemingly without hope.

The extraordinary charisma of the three new arrivals has managed to dim the luster of Batman himself. It is not Mr. Bale’s fault that the director has chosen to downplay the sacredly secret duality of Wayne/Batman; previously a deity, here he tends to be treated as just another guy hanging around police stations and gangster joints. Mr. Nolan even shifts the action briefly to Hong Kong to add Asian flavor the proceedings, perhaps because China has become so obtrusively involved in our affairs and our so-called way of life.

For that matter, Ledger’s Joker takes on the dimension of every terrorist in our most fearful imagination. He is something of a genius with high explosives and their electronic detonators. He always seems to be one step ahead of the authorities, and, on occasion, even Batman himself. By the time he has completely terrorized the people of Gotham City by blowing up half the metropolis, and ingeniously engineering the assassination of its mayor, the people are fleeing on ferries because the bridges and tunnels are too vulnerable to the Joker’s limitless terror stratagems. Ironically, Ledger’s Joker kills more mobsters than all the city’s police forces. But it’s not their loot he is after, but simply an acknowledgment by Batman and the district attorney that the battles of good vs. evil are simply exercises in futility. Finally, Batman’s greatest fear is that the Joker will completely succeed in corrupting the citizens of Gotham City, and by the time the film is over, one is not quite sure if good has really triumphed over evil. What is certain, however, is that the struggle will continue well into the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

The copious production notes for the film tell us: “Six sequences of The Dark Knight were filmed with IMAX cameras, including the opening six minutes. This marks the first time ever that a major feature film has been even partially shot using IMAX cameras, marking a revolutionary integration of the two film formats. The IMAX Experience will appear in IMAX DMR (letterbox) while scenes shot with IMAX cameras on 15/70mm film will expand vertically to fill the entire IMAX screen, which can be up to eight stories tall, for an all-encompassing moviegoing experience.”

I must confess that I did not see The Dark Knight on an IMAX screen as I was promised by the distributor. It seems that Kung Fu Panda had a prior claim to the IMAX screen. No matter; I have survived such “revolutionary” advances as 3-D, Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision, and who can remember what else? All I can say is that in my humbly Luddite opinion, The Dark Knight doesn’t have to go eight stories high to impress me with its technical virtuosity, for which I must thank, in addition to the Nolan brothers, the director of photography, Wally Pfister; the production designer, Nathan Crowley; the editor, Lee Smith; composers Hans Zimmer and Newton Howard; and the costume designer, Lindy Hemming.


HAVING NOW PRAISED The Dark Knight to the skies, and recommended it to everyone this side of Gotham City, I must ask the reader to read no further in my review of this masterpiece because I am about to reveal its darkest secret. (In other words, spoiler alert.) And what is that? Now, don’t peek. It is simply the wanton slaughter of the two most dynamic and most idealistic innocents, Mr. Eckhart’s Harvey Dent and Ms. Gyllenhaal’s Rachel Dawes. Their deaths are testaments to the omnipotently anarchic evil of Ledger’s Joker. And for once, Bruce Wayne/Batman, for all his wiles and wizardry, is unable to save either Dent or Rachel, when earlier Batmen could have rescued them with a climatic swoop of their Batmobile, and have thrown in a wedding for the two virtuous lovers besides.

But Mr. Nolan seems to have fallen into a darker mood between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, less than three years later. Has the world changed that much for the worse in the interim? One is hard-pressed to answer that question in the negative, though it may seem strange for many that so much weight is being given to a movie about a comic-book superhero. Actually, the moral despair in The Dark Knight has moved me so strongly because Mr. Nolan and his collaborators have not gone out of their way to zap the zeitgeist in primitively Bush-bashing fashion as have so many contemporary fiction and nonfiction filmmakers with a chip on their left shoulders. The political issues in The Dark Knight remain local and municipal, not really global despite the aforementioned excursion to Hong Kong.

Yet at a time when all social systems are veering toward moral bankruptcy, I was struck by the way Gotham City is presented for the first time in Batman movie history as a city with global connections, and not merely as a self-contained abstraction of a city with its own hermetically sealed morality and innocence.

Of the two precedent-shattering victims of the Joker’s anarchic ability to corrupt the most law-abiding citizens into betraying their friends and associates, Rachel is disposed of fairly quickly and without much suffering. Dent’s destruction, by contrast, is excruciatingly prolonged by its being divided into two stages, the first when half of his face is burned up at the very moment when Batman is desperately trying to save his life. Dent then briefly becomes a Batman-genre grotesque nicknamed Two-Face, who goes on a murderous spree directed against the once-trusted individuals who had betrayed him and Rachel. The Joker has thus succeeded in turning the once-crusading-for-justice Dent into everything he had previously hated.

In the end, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Alfred and Lucius Fox try to pick up the pieces of a shattered community, but their hearts don’t seem to be in it. Too many good people have died in a seemingly futile effort to reform their society. Doesn’t that seem too close to the daily world news, even though The Dark Knight is not intentionally trying to establish any real-life parallels with its own gory fictions?

I previously have had my own auteurist doubts about Mr. Nolan’s work, even though he has been much honored for his stylistic innovations in Memento (2001) and The Prestige (2006). But after The Dark Knight, I may have to rethink my past reservations about Mr. Nolan’s place in the 21st-century cinema.



Edited By MovieWes on 1216314793

[rolotomasi99]

he may be a superhero, but he is not superhuman nor is he a perfect human being. he is a crime fighter, like the police only better equipped. other than the bat suit, he is a pretty normal guy.

Um, yeah, pretty normal except for the millions that allow him to utilize these skills and utensils--something which he never (at least in the films) acknowledges--the story has built-in class issues which are routinely ignored in favor of simplistic good-vs-evil ideologies. This is why I've never understood the adoration for the Batman films: they're barren of any really deep thoughts, instead representing the darkly puerile fantasies of 12 year old boys.

Conversely, that may be why I enjoyed Iron Man so much: it was a surprisingly adult film aimed at adults and made by adults who want to grapple with genuine issues.

:p

penelope, i had to read your post several times to figure out whether it was serious or sarcastic.

*warning. total geeking out ahead.*

you by no means have to enjoy comic book movies or take them seriously, but attacking "rich" bruce wayne but praising "even more rich" tony stark was what left me scratching my head. i strongly agree with zahveed, tony stark is a capitalist pig. it came as no surprise to me he sided with the government during the marvel civil war storyline.

he probably would feel honored if bush made him the warden of guantanamo bay. i admit the movie tried to put a more liberal spin on tony by allowing the briefest of connections for him about what being in the "arms industry" actually means. ultimately, though, the character is just a fascist with a conscience. you always got the sense he was just one fried circuit away from being a villain. he always seemed willing to trade other people's "freedom" to maintain "order" (again, see marvel civil war for proof).

bruce wayne, on the other hand, may be an heir but he came about his fortune rather tragically. raised by his butler when he was a young boy, he was surrounded by people who cared only about leeching off of his fortune rather than helping him. instead of becoming the bratty playboy everyone expected, he followed his dream of helping fight crime in ways the police could not.
he may have been a vigilante, but he did not act out of revenge or anger (though those feelings were always simmering underneath). he is not a boyscout like superman or spiderman. he struggles with the challenge of fighting the bad guys without becoming a bad guy.
in this way, he reminds me very much of wolverine. a guy who wants to bring down the villains, but has to struggle with his own mistrust of the very "system" he is protecting. i am certain if dc did a similar civil war storyline, superman would lead the pro-government superheroes (like ironman) and batman would lead the pro-civil rights superheroes.

from everything i have read, THE DARK KNIGHT addresses all of this in a way no comic book movie ever has. a great deal of the movie is spent showing how similar batman and the joker are (opposite sides of the same coin), and how much this burdens bruce wayne. THE DARK KNIGHT will probably join BATMAN RETURNS, X-MEN 2, and SPIDERMAN 2 as my favorite superhero movies because it gives you a story and cinematic style worthy of its character.

oh, penelope, BATMAN BEGINS definitely dealt with the issue of poverty. it was one of the films plot points and recurring themes. bruce's parents donated the rail system of gotham for the working class, the league of shadows' attempts to destroy gotham through poverty is undone by wayne industries, this poverty leads bruce's parents to be killed, the mob taking over the economically desperate city leads bruce to first become batman, rachel dawes takes bruce to see the slums to show him the city needs a hero, bruce mentions how he wants to be able to use his fortune for good by spending it creating all the batman gadgets, alfred says bruce must act the part of a spoiled trust fund brat to hide the hero he actually is, the poorest part of the city is the backdrop of the big showdown between the police and scarecrow, and i could go on.
i honestly do not know what you are talking about, penelope, when you say class issues were ignored. burton sure did not focus on them, and schumacher completely ignored them. nolan, however, brought them front and center, and i hope they are a part of the most recent film as well.



Edited By rolotomasi99 on 1216311223

[Johnny Guitar]

Haven't seen this new Batman film (will I? probably ... eventually). But I think you're right, Penelope, about the class assumptions that often go overlooked in the franchise. It's not just the fact that Mr. Wayne is a billionaire able to secretly fund the Batcave (this part is open and doesn't need "decoding"). It's the fantasy of being able to separate, to come at social ills from a fresh, detached perspective--the perspective of being able to afford to drop out, at least in part, and 'kick ass' once you're able to devote time to accumulating the necessary wealth & skills and not have to worry about the mundane and crushing necessities of daily wage labor. It's really the Count of Monte Cristo, played out over and over--and this is why it's such a popular "pop" fantasy, it corresponds not only to the desire for material wealth & comfort, but for the power it implies to step outside the social sphere, reinvent oneself, come back and attack all injustices. It's "classist" both ways I think--a naked desire for money and privilege, but a desire really honed in to appeal to the people who have neither.

V for Vendetta (the film, at least) does the same thing. Diabolik, too, and Wesley from The Princess Bride (though he does it for love, not injustice). Surely, anyone could be a badass social avenger if they got an entire vaulted or cavernous underground lair and the time/resources to devote to making it spectacular and themselves, spectacularly, vigilantes.

Neal Stephenson skewers this nicely in Snow Crash: “Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

But I ramble...

[rolotomasi99]

I think McCain would make a good Clayface, it already looks like his face is melting away. But if anyone is The Penguin, it's Cheney. Wrah, wrah, wrah!

And how about dubya? The Riddler perhaps?

"There's a saying they have in Gotham City. Riddle me this. Riddle me... something else. Who's afraid... of Dracula? He's a bat man. He drinks the blood. He strikes terr in the hearts of men."

http://redeye.chicagotribune.com/red-sup....gallery

here is the flip-side of that game: what political party would certain superheroes belong to.

i never liked superman fighting for "truth, justice, and the american way." it struck me as sort of xenophobic and jingoistic (ironic, since he is the ultimate illegal alien). makes sense he would be a republican. he is probably a closeted log cabin repub!



Edited By OscarGuy on 1216308513

[Zahveed]

I always thought of Batman as a guy with psychological issues - split personality, obsessive compulsive, and emotional displacement being some of his problems. Whereas Tony Stark was a drunkard business mogul that turned around after being a POW, Bruce Wayne watched his parents being killed who has since then had to struggle between vengence and protecting others from the same fate. This is why I still find the character interesting as an adult. Of course, as a kid, I just thought he was cool. I won't deny that.

[Penelope]

he may be a superhero, but he is not superhuman nor is he a perfect human being. he is a crime fighter, like the police only better equipped. other than the bat suit, he is a pretty normal guy.

Um, yeah, pretty normal except for the millions that allow him to utilize these skills and utensils--something which he never (at least in the films) acknowledges--the story has built-in class issues which are routinely ignored in favor of simplistic good-vs-evil ideologies. This is why I've never understood the adoration for the Batman films: they're barren of any really deep thoughts, instead representing the darkly puerile fantasies of 12 year old boys.

Conversely, that may be why I enjoyed Iron Man so much: it was a surprisingly adult film aimed at adults and made by adults who want to grapple with genuine issues.

[rolotomasi99]

I love how the critics treat each successive Batman film as if it's discovering new and dark themes for the first time. Never has a franchise been treated so pretentiously. I think I'm going to vomit.

so...you will probably not be waiting in line for hours to see a midnight screening. :;):

while i am not predicting THE DARK KNIGHT to be nominated for best picture, i think the reason it is so plausible to some people is due to the nature of the character. he may be a superhero, but he is not superhuman nor is he a perfect human being. he is a crime fighter, like the police only better equipped. other than the bat suit, he is a pretty normal guy. it will be easy for studio execs, with the help of some pretty good critical adulation, to create some pretty convincing "for your consideration" adverts.

[Penelope]

I love how the critics treat each successive Batman film as if it's discovering new and dark themes for the first time. Never has a franchise been treated so pretentiously. I think I'm going to vomit.

[Sabin]

Slant. Schager.

***1/2/****

If superhero films reflect collective fantasies regarding the current state of the world, then this summer's batch—Iron Man and its advocacy of military hardware as a tool of upright intentions, The Incredible Hulk and its belief that rampaging fury can be harnessed for positive purposes—has been a particularly comforting one. No such uplifting reveries, however, are dispensed by The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan's majestically bleak vision of our modern age as dissolute, fragile and teetering on the precipice of anarchy. A film about the viability of justice, the tenuousness of goodness, the price of peace, and the gritty push-pull between ends and means, Nolan's follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins—a reboot whose structural and visual missteps couldn't quite diffuse its grim grandeur or its subtle suggestions of post-9/11 quandaries—is something very close to a pop masterpiece, a noir-ish DC Comics action-adventure reconfigured as a discerning, ambiguous rumination on these terrorism-besieged times. Thrilling, heady and, as befitting its title, exceedingly dark, it's epic pulp, or perhaps more accurately, it's pulp transformed through auteurist artistry into a piercingly relevant morality play epic.

Free of origin story demands, Dark Knight immediately takes up the insinuation left hanging at last film's conclusion—namely, that Batman's extreme tactics might engender an equally extreme response from opposing criminal elements. Having turned most of Gotham's organized hoods into sniveling cowards, a situation that has given District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) an opening to become the lawful "White Knight" which the city requires, Bruce Wayne/Batman (Christian Bale) discovers the terrible ramifications of his vigilantism with the appearance of the Joker (Heath Ledger). Unlike his prior adversaries, the Joker is a nihilistic lunatic driven not by idealism or greed but, instead, by the irrational desire for all-consuming chaos. A madman incapable of listening to logic or engaging in negotiation, he's the criminal flipside to Batman's whatever-it-takes mentality, a foe who recognizes that power comes from fear (the prior movie's de facto catchphrase), as well as from a willingness to cross all boundaries in order to achieve one's objectives. The poster's tagline, "Welcome to a World Without Rules," is in effect the Joker's salutation to Gotham and its nocturnal crimefighter, his sudden arrival ushering in the dreadful prospect of terror unshackled from sanity. "It's not about money," he cackles to an unsettled mobster. "It's about sending a message: Everything burns."

"Terrorist" is a term uttered only once in Nolan and brother Jonathan's speech-heavy script (from a story by Nolan and David S. Goyer), but the impression that the Joker represents fanatical contemporary forces reverberates throughout. Whereas Batman (who unconvincingly asserts that he "has no limits") strains to toe the line between right and wrong, the Joker commences from a different set of standards, which is to say no standards at all save for a conviction that the societal constraints preventing man from indulging his basest instincts are flimsy and counterfeit and must be torn asunder by every available method. The Joker is, essentially, a radical extension of Batman Begins's Ra's Al Ghul, who sought to cure Western metropolitan degeneracy through a cleansing fire. And as a result, Dark Knight resounds with a throbbing topical undercurrent, its superficially good-versus-evil setup slowly revealed to be a complex examination of the ways in which democracies can, and must, combat zealotry. For Batman, the Joker poses not simply a practical dilemma (i.e. how does he stop this lunatic?) but also, fundamentally, an ethical one, centered on the necessity, and repercussions, of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons.

Dark Knight is a series of pertinent moral predicaments delivered via sleek procedural-genre circumstances, so that the film's attention to difficult, contentious issues—concerning violence, the application of might, and the questionable sanctity of civil liberties (specifically surveillance-free privacy) in times of crisis—is filtered through a barrage of tense, breakneck centerpiece sequences. Toned down, mercifully, is Batman Begins's sliced-to-incomprehensible-ribbons editing and choreography, as the Caped Crusader's hand-to-hand scuffles are now staged with considerably more lucidity. More striking still, the scope of the action (like that of the saga's themes) has been expanded, with Batman's hand-wringing over notions of sacrifice, righteousness and corruption given robust weight by numerous, visceral clashes (all set to Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard's thunderously stately score), including a muscular chase through a downtown tunnel replete with rocket launchers, flipped semis, the Humvee-ish Batmobile and a swift, versatile new motorcycle dubbed the Bat-pod. Nolan shoots these incidents—notably a Batman-Joker showdown on an empty city street—with an eye toward both electric intensity and iconographic splendor, and their dynamism is further enhanced by the director's employment of breathtakingly beautiful IMAX-formatted cinematography that, at key moments, literally magnifies the proceedings to enveloping proportions.

The narrative's expertly modulated light-dark balance is epitomized by Batman and the Joker, but fully embodied by that of Harvey Dent, a people's champion viewed by all (including Batman) as Gotham's best hope for lasting change. Dent is Gotham's legitimate above-the-board hero, one capable of successfully doting on colleague Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, more than ably replacing Katie Holmes) in a way the tormented, dual life-ensconced Wayne isn't. The prospect of Dent cleaning up the streets, though, is obliterated by—spoilers herein—a second-act tragedy which mutates him into the coin-flipping Two-Face, a vengeful madman furious at his unjust fate and convinced by the Joker (during a phenomenal hospital-room encounter) that "The thing about chaos—it's fair." Tragically confirming his own prior opinion that "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain," Dent comes to exemplify communal hopes dashed, a disheartening symbol of the inefficacy of traditional methods (such as the anti-conspiracy RICO charges he used to indict Mafioso kingpins) in an unconventional battle, and of the old world order's irrelevance in the face of proliferating disorder.

In Dent's destruction lies the film's estimation of the chances for decency to survive against unrepentant wickedness. This overarching air of gloom and doom, however, is complemented by unsentimental pragmatism, an edge supplied by Batman's struggle—which also engulfs loyal compatriots Lt. Gordon (Gary Oldman) and Wayne Enterprises CEO Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman)—to inspire Gotham by giving it a guiding image of unassailable virtue. The dawning realization that setting this example might be both impossible and counterproductive plagues Batman (once again brought to tortured, brooding life by Bale) as well as the film, which inevitably wends its way toward a climax in which solutions for intractable problems are rooted not in rah-rah heroism but, rather, in making, as trusted Wayne butler Alfred (Michael Caine) puts it, "the hard choice." It's a stance that's doggedly conservative (in a political sense), positing the circumnavigation of laws as the only truly effective course of action against enemies not beholden to sensible codes of conduct. Yet if Dark Knight ultimately backs Batman into a by-any-means-necessary corner, it does so while simultaneously (and morosely) acknowledging that the decisions he makes, regardless of their immediate success, carry with them enduring, potentially harmful consequences.

Dark Knight thrives on such controversial ideas, but they wouldn't provide a sinister, deranged kick without the Joker himself, and after months of postmortem anticipation, Ledger's final completed screen performance wholly lives up to the hype. His mouth scarred into a warped grin, his tongue erratically, hungrily licking at his lips, and his wet tangle of hair swaying in sync with his unhinged mannerisms, Ledger's malevolent outlaw is perversity incarnate, a smiling sadist whose mordant humor and playfulness merely accentuate his twisted maliciousness. There's a beautiful ugliness to the actor's turn, his psychopath fearsome less because of his unpredictable cruelty or the gleeful enjoyment he takes from behaving inhumanly than because of the canny, demented intellect that underscores his plot to expose mankind's barely inhibited viciousness. Eighteen years after Jack Nicholson's over-praised, distinctly Jack-ish personification of the dastardly purple-clad jester in Tim Burton's Batman, Ledger returns the character to his demented The Killing Joke graphic novel roots, conjuring up a transfixing, indelible portrait of our worst terrorist-extremist nightmares. Like Nolan's exceptional sequel, he presents us with a world without rules and, in the process, rewrites the rules of what's achievable with a summer superhero blockbuster.

[OscarGuy]

Yeah, but I'm sure she'd be more interested in Poison Ivy or Harlequin than Batman...

[rolotomasi99]

i imagine condi would make a great catwoman. i bet she has a black leather outfit and whip already in her closet.