Jesus I don't know where to start.
I'm not that great at getting my thoughts down, at least not as good as wandering the streets of NY and shouting to the heavens.
The Dark Knight.
This is NOT a great movie.
I don't care what anyone says. I don't care that 300 million dollars worth of people have flocked to this piece of crap. It's bad and deep down, you all know it.
First off: Really? Wall to wall music?!?!? Loud enough to drown out the mumblespeak? Why? Perhaps its because your plot has so many holes and the editing is so poor that you need to cover it up with false melodrama????
Worst Batman cowl in history.
Action sequences so dark and convoluted that nothing makes sense and it's impossible to rally behind the heroes.
I'm not going to go into it here. It's all too exhausting. But i want to bring up one part of the film that illustrates my point. Some of you might think that I am being petty. I am not. I am right.
Okay.
I call this the Lorne Michaels/Titanic factor.
In the early 70s Lorne made a change in a sketch between dress and show. It was a date sketch and the suitor brought flowers to the girl. "Make it candy" he said. Why?
Because flowers create an anxiety in the audience. What will she do with them? She has to put them in water otherwise they will die. Since the flowers aren't the thrust of the scene, make it candy and there is no anxiety.
In other words: Take care of your audience.
Titanic: Roger Ebert pointed this out a decade ago. The scene on the boat in present time when the crew member is showing old Rose the computer images of what happened to to ship, the holds over flowing and so forth. Remember that? You know why it's there? Because later, when that shit was happening to our heroes, we already know exactly what is going on and don't need someone to explain it. We're taken care of.
I bring this up (and here is the petty part) because...SPOILER ALERT
What the fuck happened between the Joker and the cop in the holding cell? I NEED to see something. It isn't enough for the joker to just have overpowered a 20 year veteran with nothing on him but his shirtsleeves. In fact, the way he would have done it would say a helluva lot about the Joker and who he is. Instead, he's just walking out with the lummox at gunpoint.
Please. This isn't taking care of an audience. It's taking an audience for granted. And it's bad, bad, film making.
UPDATE: Okay. I guess the neck cracking moment is a sign of what is about to come. But I still think it's a really clumsy moment and a cheap exclusion.
Maybe we are inured to poor storytelling. Maybe videogames have made it so that we just accept action sequences with no build up and take set pieces for brilliance. I wish not.
I miss The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3
I miss The French Connection
I miss Die Hard
I miss Die Hard 2
I miss Lethal Weapon
I miss good action films. Period. Where the action was generated by reason and logic and the emotion was something we clung to.
I miss Michael Keaton. The reason he was the best Batman? Not because i am an old fart. But because he brought sanity to his myopic crazy. He understood the duality of his character. He was tortured. He wasn't a martyr or self righteous. He was in pain. I could relate to that.
Tim Burton got that, too. There has to be sex in your violence. There has to be humor in your pathos. Otherwise it's so fucking heavy you want to leave.
Heath Ledger got that. he found the humor in the pathos, the sex in the violence.
he was the only one.
Batman: The Dark Knight is everything that Iron Man wasn't. Which is not to say it's good. Quite the opposite. Iron Man was an achievement on a scale that Batman could not reach. It never pandered to it's audience but it took care of us. It engaged us even when it was silly and outrageous. And it took it's beyond-comprehension technology and made us believe and understand it.
Batman does not do this. The sonar phone pseudo-colossus device? Too fucking confusing and ridiculous for words.
Oh, and the plot about turning Gotham into chaos? Wasn't that last movie as well? Jeez!
This is a bad bad bad movie.
You know I'm right.
4 comments:
Dude! The Dark Knight rocks! Are you smoking crack or something?(!)
By the time of the Joker escaping with that cop it has been established REPEATEDLY that the Joker is suprisingly adept at hand to hand combat. Surely if he can take out gangsters he can take out a flabby old cop?
No music in a lot of the scenes (e.g. most of the truck chase) too.
ryan dunne
The action sequences are where the music needed to be. Not swelling during a dinner conversation. The reason for so much of it is to cover that fact that this isn't a script as much as a series of highly charged scenelets with no human or real conversation within. How to mask that? Slather it with music.
My point about the cop is exactly that. Why NOT show it? You've shown everything else. Show us that moment as well.
Because if you do show it, how he overwhelms a cop with just his bare hands, no tricks, no gimmicks, then The Joker becomes human. And Nolan is under the misconception that The Joker shouldn't be humanized. Above all things, his humanity is what drives him.
So, yes. Show me that moment.
Overall, I did like this movie, but GREAT movie? Number 1 on the IMDb? No.
It's just way too damn long, the action sequences are terribly filmed (although I liked the truck chase), and there are any number of scenes that don't go anywhere (especially in the beginning) that really should've been cut out.
I hate, though, that I still have to say that I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't Iron Man, but I did enjoy it. What I hate is sounding like those idiots who are basically saying (in reviews they get PAID for): "There were all sorts of problems with the first act and it goes on way too long and it's kind of sick and violent and Maggie Gyllenhaal is terrible BUT IT'S AN UNMITIGATED CLASSIC!"
Take a breath, America.
(And I remember we disagreed on the Batman Begins water-evaporating thingamabob--you were irritaerd, it didn't bother me--but we are son in synch on the idiotic sonar thing in the sequel.)
whew, thanks, Aaron. Usually I don't read reviews and some of the people that I know that LOVE this movie, well, I usually don't agree with them about cultural things, anyway. But one person, Bemis from Cinevistaramascope, he usually gets it right and was so far apart from him and his opinion that I really thought there might be something wrong with my brain for a minute or two.
I think this flick could have used a pair of scissors and, maybe a narration. Just kidding about that part. But, wow, confusarama.
Thanks for the even keeled perspective.
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