[Movie] The Dark Knight (Batman Begins Sequel)

Originally Posted by Sassafrass

Remove the Batman aspect and what have you got? Just another action movie with some force-fed pseudo-intellectual message.

This is probably the briefest and most intelligent description I've seen of the movie yet.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

Crazy is a great motivation for a villain and should always have concrete explanations made to explain the depths of its waters

I'm not sure I agree. We never know the story behind Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet - but not only is he completely fucking insane and scary as hell - but his performance isn't some crappy insanity pastiche usually reserved for the worst episodes of Law And Order: Special Victims Unit. You know, like the one where that kid played that Dungeons And Dragons videogame and tried to save his dead stepsister?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Rotorblade

I hate "crazy" as a discussion point in most villains, especially in the Joker's case.

I think its a fantastic discussion point. The problem is that almost no one is properly equipt to discuss the topic.

And then you have the other half who are these third year pysch majors who think its clever to attempt to profile a comic book character. Yeah, okay, keep that up and you'll be a short-order cook for truckers in three years time.

This is exactly a problem with TDK - the "lets sit around and discuss our motivations!" like a goddamned summer camp sing-along. You know why Mask Of The Phantasm is the best Batman movie made? They don't discuss the reasons, they just tell a story; everything you can ask for is there if you decide to break it down, instead of the writer throwing it in your face.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Originally Posted by Denicalis

Even pseudo-intellectualism beats that shit any day of the week.

I disagree and adamantly - and I'll tell you why if you give me enough elbow room.

Pseudo-intellectualisms got us crap like V For Vendetta (which is basically backhanded support of fascism) and Pan's Labyrinth (Liberal apologist bullshit for the Franco regime) while actual genuine criticisms of fascism or liberal stupidity like Starship Troopers are shoe-horned as nihilistic garbage. (People who like TDK cannot like Starship Troopers - because one force-feeds the audience while the other makes absolutely no qualms with its moral uncertainty.)

Protip: Starship Troopers is one of the most important movies you will ever watch because it breaks the single most sacred convention of war movies - and ends up making a much more important point on the topic of war than Platoon or Saving Private Ryan ever could attempt in their best wet dreams.

The Dark Knight is similar. The movie is handing a gun loaded with half-assed bullshit to a crowd of comic book fans in an roughshod attempt to be intelligent. Now, I'm all for intellectual comic book movies that fail in-so-far as they're earnest in the attempt (see - Hulk) but TDK is nothing more than a series of community college midterm essays on some half-understood Jungian imagery and maybe some super-basic concepts of duology thrown in.

This is dangerous in the ways that Kevin Smith is dangerous - its not intellectual, its fucking Philosophy For Dummies. So now you've armed every Joe Queer and Betsy Buttfuck with some stupid egotistical chin-stroke where they all can argue about topics that go straight over their fucking IQs.

"Yes," they agree together, "Joker does complete Batman!"

No no no. Thats something which has been discussed and taken apart and insinuated at for 60 years; if you're a screenwriter and you can't say such a thing in subtle terms, you shouldn't be writing this kind of shit. This is like letting Maxim into Joseph Campbell's private study.

I know you get this Deni, and thats why its frustrating to me. With more time, perhaps you'll notice that the cracks in the movie are in fact faults which the whole thing comes apart under. Its pop culture intellectualism for the people who need to be smashed over the head with Jim Beam bottles to see the obvious. You are not so stupid and neither am I - and liking a movie for those reasons is to lower yourself to the ignorances of the average American idiot.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Originally Posted by Denicalis

Idiots will proliferate not because there are movies for stupid people, but because stupid people lack the drive to read anything beyond school textbooks or graphic novels. It's not an intelligent flick, it's not even a step in the right direction, but it is a departure from something like Spider Man. And I'll take that for what it is. Not a victory, but at least a draw.

Hogwash. Your defense is that people will kill people no matter what, so we shouldn't have gun laws.

Any type of bolstering the ignorant to remain ignorant and perpetuate ignorance is a bad thing and this movie is exactly this type of coddling.

I don't think I'd've found the exposition or the cliche crime set-ups or the average acting so insulting if the fucking thing didn't TELL YOU exactly what to think. Theres no fucking excuse for pulling the teeth out of the viper, except that everyone is afraid to be bitten and this movie simply attempts to gum everyone to death.

A draw is not good enough. It should never be good enough. Why the fuck would you ever want to be placated?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Denicalis

Though I am curious, LeHah. What's your take on the Prestige?

I saw one turn-of-the-century magician movie in 2006 and it was The Illusionist.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Immigrant Overflow

Guys. Has it ever occurred to you that, while your gripes and complaints about how a certain movie is made may or may not be warranted, you guys just happen to over-analyze every single thing to the point where you no longer enjoy a simple popcorn movie?

You'd have a point - if this were Iron Man. But its not, so you're in the wrong conversation.

FELIPE NO

So wait.

Enceph steps in to tell people to stop discussing the movie.

Then LZ comes in and fails at what the internet construes as farce or humor or something.

And this is the community we all signed up for? Yuck.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Originally Posted by Immigrant Overflow

If this is about the most complicated thought you can process from this, we'll just go ahead and go with that.

Oh, so you only respond to the parts of a post you choose to. How clever.

Originally Posted by Immigrant Overflow

I will seriously never understand why you subliminally hate this place so much and still remain here.

I cannot fathom why a staff member wants to kill a thread topic for absolutely no reason. You basically come off as someone's snot-nosed kid brother trying to butt in on a conversation between adults. If you're not going to fucking add anything to the pre-exisiting conversation, its okay to sit one out, rope-a-dope.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Shin

Oh wow, just wow. I think you've just pushed your character over the line from comedy into farce with those two statements mate.

The Hulk, while it didn't get where it was going, was basically nothing more than a child neglect story.

V For Vendetta is literally "If you don't agree with us, you're not only wrong, you're also Hitler".

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Shin

Ha ha ha, I see what you mean. I was a big fan of the V graphic novel before I saw the film so I guess knowing all the rest of the story that gets left out makes it slighty less in-your-face preachy.

It's certainly a movie that is darned sure it has a message but can't even begin to figure out what it's supposed to be. It's one of those movies that idiots think is clever, like The Matrix. (As opposed to, say, Fight Club. Fight Club is a fairly smart movie ruined entirely by people, V is a fairly stupid movie treated the same way. I'd say there's still something to Fight Club; It's not the amazing meaning of life that every disaffected myspace user has been insisting for the past several years, but it does say something.)

V, though, is pretty far from subversive. Just the opposite, even -- it removes things from the comic to make it more appealing to general people... and all the stuff it adds are really really generic obvious modern jabs. The overwhelming sense you get from the comic is that it's just a 1984 pasthche - the overwhelming sense you get from the movie is that it's artistic cannibalism to remove points from the original plot to substitute whats popular to fight against in 2006.

"V.." was written as commentary against anti-gay politics in 1980s England. The movie still has all the stuff about the British government putting gays in concentration camps and the obvious message there -- but at the same time, V himself isn't gay in the movie, when he is a homosexual in the book.

If you want to be more exacting - why are you taking material that is rallying against the British Government by using a character in a Guy Fawkes mask, and then making it a movie about rallying against the Bush administration ... using a character in a Guy Fawkes mask? Shouldn't he be wearing a George Washington mask or something?

Originally Posted by Alan Moore 8/30/2006

"(The movie) has been "turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country.... It's a thwarted and frustrated and largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values standing up against a state run by neoconservatives—which is not what the comic V for Vendetta was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about England."

I think the movie is dated a lot more than the comic is, though, because lots of it comes off as clear attempts to glob modern commentary to a story where it doesn't belong and makes no sense. The comic has a taken-from-Orwell radio voice of authority who reports all the news - but the movie turns that into a Bill O'Reilly angry news commentator character. And they're part of the evil British fascist government and responsible for the concentration camps and such.

Way to be slick, Hollywood.

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OH NO A PERSON NONE OF US WILL NEVER MEET HAS BEEN ARRESTED

WHATEVER WILL WE DO

TURN ON THE SIRENS RELEASE THE DOGS NOTIFY THE THUNDERBIRDS

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Just when you think a thread about a crappy movie can't get anymore craptastic

I was speaking idiomatically.

Quote:

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

By Armond White

The Dark Knight
Directed by Christopher Nolan

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.

I both strongly disagree and strongly agree with this critic on the movie. While I think Mr White puts far too much emphasis on Burton as a filmmaker (since, lets face it, Burton at his best is simply tasteful pastiche) and an overemphasis on Nicholson's Joker (which is nothing more than Jack Nicholson... in make-up), the points of society being too obsessed with pesudo-babble pro-facist pop-psych bullshit IS running the whole comic book movie system into the ground.

Anyone else agree or disagree with the above quote?

(For the record: I hated The Black Dahlia)

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Cal

SHOOPITY DOOP DOOP DOO.

Ain't that the truth. I like the fact the guy tries to say the role ala Nicholson is some kind of sarcastic remark about insanity - but JESUS thats a load of BS.

FELIPE NO

Given his (megalith's) crappy taste in everything, ever and his current avatar - yes.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Diss your last post? Ahead of you on that score, cowboy.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Batman Begins was disqualified for the same reasons - five names were listed as composers on the music cue sheet, though only Zimmer and Howard get credit.

"That apparently wasn't enough for the majority of the committee, which was also supplied with documentation indicating that more than 60%, but less than 70%, of the score was credited to Zimmer and Howard."

Its mathmatics of credit, not whatever the internet tells you.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Cellius

As if a 2-hour D minor ostinato would have gotten it anyway.

Phillip Glass has been nominated three times.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.