| Strange Reactions |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|03:26 am] |
It's weird. For the first time ever in almost six years of blogging, I don't want to blog about something because it feels like I'm name-dropping. But at the same time, the words "So I saw The Dark Knight today with Neil Gaiman" are pretty relevant.
The interesting thing is that on many levels, it's not a big deal. I mean, Neil is very nice; he sat up with us in the lounge for a few hours afterwards, talking comics and short stories with us. But at the same time, being at Clarion's a very human experience, and seeing The Dark Knight with Neil is not much different than doing dramatic readings of bad fiction with Kelly Link or getting into a water gun fight with Jim Kelly or discussing polyamory with Mary Anne Mohanraj.
Yeah, they're big-time authors. But they're, like, people.
When you're outside of things like that looking in, blogging seems like OMG I'M HANGING WITH A WORLD FANTASY AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR. But really, the best part is that you're doing stuff you'd want to do anyway and doing it with accomplished writers. I would have gone to see The Dark Knight in any case. I'm thrilled to see it with Dana and Crystal, my fellow comics nerds here. I'm even more thrilled to see it with Neil, who obviously has some intriguing thoughts on comic books as well.
And the movie? It was indeed awesome. I'm not going to get into major spoilers, but there are a couple of things here:
1) Heath Ledger. I went into this film prepared to be irritated at his performance. The post-mortem halo effect seemed to be occluding the movie, and I was bitching to people that "I'm probably going to see something that's good for a superhero film, and then everyone's going to blow it up into something great because it's his last role."
No. Heath Ledger, it must be said, knocked this one out of the park. The Oscars have a deep distaste of superhero movies, and they really hate nominating dead guys for the win, so I doubt it'll be up there, but comparisons have been made to Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. Given that Heath's Joker has no backstory to work with, this is a nuanced, beautiful, terrifyingly complex performance that is as good as anything else you will see on screen.
2) The interesting thing is that this not really a Batman movie. Really? It's about Harvey Dent. Which is, in its own way, a far more interesting choice to make, because Batman's almost inherently static. In fact, you kind of forget that Christian Bale's in this movie at all.
3) The plot is great. It's the only superhero movie I've seen where I feel I don't have to make excuses for it.
4) That said, "The Batman voice" worked in the last film because Christian only had to utter lines like "And you'll never have to" before flapping off into the darkness - giving him entire soliloquies to gargle out as Batman probably isn't the best dramatic choice here.
5) What's up with the fight scenes in this movie? They're exciting, sure, but half the time I can't tell what the fuck is going on. There's no real arc to the fight scenes - either Batman's just sort of blur-camming his opponents into oblivion, or he's on the ground getting the shit kicked out of him. Hey, guys, knowing what's going on is tech.
6) The genius of this film is that really, it condenses everything you need to know about Batman and the Joker into one scene. If you've seen the movie, you know the one; it's where the Joker is in the middle of the street, walking out of the bus*, and Batman is racing towards him. The power of that scene, and what it says about both of them, is fucking phenomenal.
7) One of the things we've said a lot at Clarion is that every story should be about something that can only be told with this protagonist. Which is a fancy way of saying that if your detective story can have your lead character yanked out and replaced with any other detective, you've failed. And the genius to the ending of Dark Knight Returns is that it's something that can only be done by Batman - this ending would totally never work for Spider-Man, or Superman, or the Punisher or anyone else. It says something deep about Batman's motivations, what he's willing to do to win, and I love that about it.
8) The lounge discussion is, of course, how do you top this? And you really can't. This is as big as Batman gets. You can try to shoehorn in other villains, natch, but the pool's running dry - Penguin and The Riddler aren't going to work too well in the Nolanverse Batman. Bane might be an option, but it's too similar to the Joker's arc in many ways. Catwoman's the obvious choice, but she's not a main villain - she's someone who has to be in the middle, switching loyalties. So who? Nobody's coming to mind.
9) This cements Christopher Nolan firmly in the category of "Best Director of the 21st Century" in my opinion. He has yet to make a movie that's anything less than excellent.
* - Oh, stop. This was in the trailer. |
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