imax tickets are still in short supply out here, so george and joe and i had our date with batman at the faux-old movie house up by lincoln center yesterday afternoon. it was a decent date, if a bit longer than i would have liked: i wasn't thinking clearly when i bought a tureen of diet coke on the way in, but i think my soda and director christopher nolan share the blame for my thinking/hoping the movie was over at about six different points. i agree with david denby, who noted in his new yorker review that the early scenes in hong kong ate up screen time that would have been better spent fleshing out more important plot points later on (the financier's little story arc was completely superfluous, and the technology introduced in china could've come up in a short scene later on). i also agree with the crowd predicting awards for heath ledger, who deserves them all: after campy, stylized jokers like cesar romero's and jack nicholson's, it was fairly shocking to watch a plausible one. batman has always been less fictional than the rest of the supers: he's got great gadgets and a lot of time on his hands and...that's kind of it. his origin story is unlikely, but it's not impossible. in letting us follow his work over his shoulder - letting us see the little vulnerabilities and psychoses that add up to his character - heath ledger gives the joker the bruce wayne treatment: he's terrifying because he's not impossible, either. the dark knight wasn't great, but that was extraordinary. what did you think, internets? i've tried to avoid spoilers, but comment boxes just love 'em.
7 comments:
Well, I think it was more a Chris Nolan movie then a superhero movie, in the end. But, it reminded me WAY WAY to much of what it felt like to live just blocks from the world trade center in late 2001/2002, with New York gripped with mindless terror. By the time I realized I was close to throwing up from all the ick it was bringing up, I probably should have walked out to wait it out at the theatre bar, but noooo, I had to stay all the way through. Just thinking about it makes me want a drink.
I'm sensitive on the subject, so it's hard for me to tell how evocative it really was. In general though, I don't think it would have killed them to make it slightly less bleak in the end. Aren't superhero action movies supposed to reassure us that in the end the good guys win? Or something? I love bleak, but I shy away from hopeless.
i lucked out of the visceral reaction you had, meg, since i got to the city so much later than you did (may '03) and haven't spent a lot of time downtown. that said, one of the profile shots of christian bale bowing his head astride a mangled piece of scaffolding recalled NYC rescue workers pretty irresponsibly (one earns the right to draw from that well, and nolan didn't). otherwise, to me, gotham screamed chicago so loudly that i half expected to see marina city in one of the gotham-in-lockdown aerial shots toward the end.
there were a few hopeful notes in there, i think: according to the dueling ferries sequence, there's a bit of humanity left in town (in the big, scary, tattooed convicts, no less! i thought the "gotcha" of the switch thrown out the window was a bit cheesy, but in an inky movie like that one, you take good guys where you can get them, i guess). i also love gary oldman as commissioner gordon: he's not the most exciting character, but he's A Good Man and a satisfying constant.
i really enjoyed the dark knight. i know i'm going to have a hard time explaining myself here--at least in comparison to the depth of observations made herein (the comment box & post), i predict some deficiencies, so bear with me. and indeed, i'm not a new yorker and certain things don't pop for me as was stated above.
i find value in entertainment and in being drawn in to a piece and engaged with viable characters. the acting was well done, and i mean it just as i say it: there was nothing gregarious about bale or freeman or anyone else for that matter. though there were times when i thought maggie gyllenhaal was being too much gyllenhaal and for that i blame her star status--i'm far from having a problem with her acting: she does a fine job, but could she have embraced this more and helped the audience (me) forget who she is?
heath ledger was the shit, and deserves recognition for it. for hours afterward i noticed what people did with their mouths/lips/tongue when the weren't speaking.
and, wow, just when was the last time i waited in line for a movie? or went to another theater because the time i wanted was sold out? or fandango'd tickets to insure my place at the other theater? it was worth it.
I will note for the record that Gotham = Chicago. In fact, they filmed several of the scenes on LaSalle Street, right by my office.
Security on the set/street was super tight. I had to get through two security guards once just to get into my office late at night.
Those motorbikes with the huge wheels were parked right outside my front door one evening. I said to a security guard, "I want one of those."
There were a couple things I didn't quite buy - the guy on the non-convict boat refusing to press the button, for example; it just didn't square with his demands for it seconds earlier and with the general willingness of the movie to sacrifice happy resolutions for the sake of internal logic - but mostly I thought it was awesome. (Well, except how come they had to kill off Two-Face so fast?)
Courtney (dejected): "this movie just goes on and on!"
Me (delighted): "I KNOW!"
ALSO - this is completely unrelated, but I've lost your email address and can't ask you directly - are those Stephenie Meyer books in your reading list making you want to poke your eyes out? I should really read em for this art project I'm working on, but the reviews lead me to believe that they'll just make me weep and gnash my teeth for the girls of America....
aye, hannah: they make my head hurt for seventeen different reasons (i'm halfway through a post about that, actually). that said, the other two are en route to me; i really can't not ingest vampire trash.
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