The BATMAN Thread

Saikin

New review from Rolling Stone. They gave it 3.5 out of 4. Average user rating is 4.

SPOILERS

Hidden Text:

Heads up: a thunderbolt is about to rip into the blanket of bland we call summer movies. The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan's absolute stunner of a follow-up to 2005's Batman Begins, is a potent provocation decked out as a comic-book movie. Feverish action? Check. Dazzling spectacle? Check. Devilish fun? Check. But Nolan is just warming up. There's something raw and elemental at work in this artfully imagined universe. Striking out from his Batman origin story, Nolan cuts through to a deeper dimension. Huh? Wha? How can a conflicted guy in a bat suit and a villain with a cracked, painted-on clown smile speak to the essentials of the human condition? Just hang on for a shock to the system. The Dark Knight creates a place where good and evil '” expected to do battle '” decide instead to get it on and dance. "I don't want to kill you," Heath Ledger's psycho Joker tells Christian Bale's stalwart Batman. "You complete me." Don't buy the tease. He means it.

The trouble is that Batman, a.k.a. playboy Bruce Wayne, has had it up to here with being the white knight. He's pissed that the public sees him as a vigilante. He'll leave the hero stuff to district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and stop the DA from moving in on Rachel Dawes (feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, in for sweetie Katie Holmes), the lady love who is Batman's only hope for a normal life.

Everything gleams like sin in Gotham City (cinematographer Wally Pfister shot on location in Chicago, bringing a gritty reality to a cartoon fantasy). And the bad guys seem jazzed by their evildoing. Take the Joker, who treats a stunningly staged bank robbery like his private video game with accomplices in Joker masks, blood spurting and only one winner. Nolan shot this sequence, and three others, for the IMAX screen and with a finesse for choreographing action that rivals Michael Mann's Heat. But it's what's going on inside the Bathead that pulls us in. Bale is electrifying as a fallibly human crusader at war with his own conscience.

I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker. Miles from Jack Nicholson's broadly funny take on the role in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman, Ledger takes the role to the shadows, where even what's comic is hardly a relief. No plastic mask for Ledger; his face is caked with moldy makeup that highlights the red scar of a grin, the grungy hair and the yellowing teeth of a hound fresh out of hell. To the clown prince of crime, a knife is preferable to a gun, the better to "savor the moment."

The deft script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, taking note of Bob Kane's original Batman and Frank Miller's bleak rethink, refuses to explain the Joker with pop psychology. Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger."

The Joker represents the last completed role for Ledger, who died in January at 28 before finishing work on Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas '” he's all rampaging id. Watch him crash a party and circle Rachel, a woman torn between Bale's Bruce (she knows he's Batman) and Eckhart's DA, another lover she has to share with his civic duty. "Hello, beautiful," says the Joker, sniffing Rachel like a feral beast. He's right when he compares himself to a dog chasing a car: The chase is all. The Joker's sadism is limitless, and the masochistic delight he takes in being punched and bloodied to a pulp would shame the Marquis de Sade. "I choose chaos," says the Joker, and those words sum up what's at stake in The Dark Knight.

The Joker wants Batman to choose chaos as well. He knows humanity is what you lose while you're busy making plans to gain power. Every actor brings his A game to show the lure of the dark side. Michael Caine purrs with sarcastic wit as Bruce's butler, Alfred, who harbors a secret that could crush his boss's spirit. Morgan Freeman radiates tough wisdom as Lucius Fox, the scientist who designs those wonderful toys '” wait till you get a load of the Batpod '” but who finds his own standards being compromised. Gary Oldman is so skilled that he makes virtue exciting as Jim Gordon, the ultimate good cop and as such a prime target for the Joker. As Harvey tells the Caped Crusader, "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain." Eckhart earns major props for scarily and movingly portraying the DA's transformation into the dreaded Harvey Two-Face, an event sparked by the brutal murder of a major character.

No fair giving away the mysteries of The Dark Knight. It's enough to marvel at the way Nolan '” a world-class filmmaker, be it Memento, Insomnia or The Prestige '” brings pop escapism whisper-close to enduring art. It's enough to watch Bale chillingly render Batman as a lost warrior, evoking Al Pacino in The Godfather II in his delusion and desolation. It's enough to see Ledger conjure up the anarchy of the Sex Pistols and A Clockwork Orange as he creates a Joker for the ages. Go ahead, bitch about the movie being too long, at two and a half hours, for short attention spans (it is), too somber for the Hulk crowd (it is), too smart for its own good (it isn't). The haunting and visionary Dark Knight soars on the wings of untamed imagination. It's full of surprises you don't see coming. And just try to get it out of your dreams.

PETER TRAVERS

(Posted: Jul 18, 2008)

http://www.rollingstone.com/reviews/mov … ark_knight

tejastech08

James Lofton wrote:

tejastech08 wrote:
Not everyone. I told you to watch Begins first. Should have listened to me.
Karma.
Yeah under most circumstances I will not watch a sequel before the original, but I had dragged my ass for years not watching Begins, and since the opportunity came up to watch this, I went ahead and did it before I waited too long and it left theaters.

I have Begins now, although reluctant to watch it after that ordeal. Might try it out tonight though.

I will say this. TDK feels like a completely different movie from Begins. Begins has a much slower pace for the first hour of it. It's an origin story so it's mostly about Bruce Wayne.

tejastech08

Saikin, that was actually the first review posted on the Internet. So it's not really new. LOL.

James

I didn't watch it last night, but I think I'll check it out tonight. Loved the video game, so hopefully the movie is pretty much the same thing.

tejastech08

James Lofton wrote:

I didn't watch it last night, but I think I'll check it out tonight. Loved the video game, so hopefully the movie is pretty much the same thing.

As I said, it feels like a different movie than TDK for sure. Much slower pace. Tons of character development with Bruce Wayne, Rachel, and Alfred.

RussTCB

removed

Neemo

bale sounds like hes strung out ... wonder if he and ledger shared a problem?

LONDON - Batman star Christian Bale was arrested Tuesday over allegations of assaulting his mother and sister, police and British media said.
British media had reported that Bale's mother and sister complained they were assaulted by the 34-year-old actor at the Dorchester Hotel in London on Sunday night, a day before the European premiere of his latest film, "The Dark Knight."
The women made the allegation at a local police station in southern England on Monday, Britain's Press Association news agency said.
Asked whether Bale had been arrested, a police spokesman did not refer to him by name but said: "A 34-year-old man attended a central London police station this morning by appointment and was arrested in connection with an allegation of assault." He said the man was still in custody but gave no further details.
The spokesman spoke on condition of anonymity because force policy did not authorize him to be identified. British police do not name suspects before they are formally charged.
U.S.-based representatives for Bale didn't immediately return messages seeking comment. Repeated phone calls to Bale's London representative went unanswered.
The Sun newspaper said police didn't question the actor Monday because they didn't want to interfere with the premiere of the movie.
Wales-born Bale first made a splash as the child star of Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun" in 1987. His screen credits also include "American Psycho," "The Machinist" and "Batman Begins."
In "The Dark Knight," Bale reprises the role of wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne and his crime-fighting alter-ego Batman, a brooding vigilante superhero still scarred by the murder of his parents.
The film, which stars the late Heath Ledger as Batman's nemesis The Joker, took in a record $158.4 million at the box office in its opening weekend in the U.S. last week.

Saikin

russtcb wrote:

Attention:
I've had to edit more then a few posts in this section to add the Spoiler tag. As mentioned before the movie came out, we have members who live in regions where the film isn't released yet so we'd like for you to use the Spoiler tag for a couple weeks please.
Some may not know how it works so here's a quick lesson; What I generally do it hit the Spoiler button up there then type between the two boxes that appear. When you submit the post, it'll be blocked out for those who do not want to see it.
Another method (in the case of cutting and pasting) is to paste your text, highlight everything you don't want seen, then hit the Spoiler button. That will have the same effect on your text and no one will have to avoid the post or the thread in general.
Thx!

What spoiler tag? I can't see any spoiler tag, and i can't see a BH smiley either.

RussTCB

removed

Saikin

The only tags i see is http://, IMG, Code and Quote. Nothing else.

is the last smiley i see. Don't we have a youtube tag or something as well?

I use IE 7. Would that have something to do with it?

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