YACCS We've been using YACCS for comments for a long time now ... but all good things come to end and YACCS is going away at the end of the year. I'm currently unable to approve pending comments.
Baggage in the Bat Belt I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight. It's certainly a very good to great movie, as everyone else has said. Heath Ledger is a mortal lock for an Oscar here if they submit him as a supporting actor. I'd even argue he could possibly score a Best Actor win - considering Anthony Hopkins did it with 15 minutes of screen time as Hannibal Lector. Does Lector/Clarice being man and woman somehow change the equation? They were both considered leads. Why not the Joker? This is really his film.
I'd further argue - because, you know, I like to argue - that it is a fairly iffy film without him. There were two things I'd heard about before going in and unfortunately, they did taint the film a bit for me. Somewhere, I'd read a dig about Christian Bale's Batman voice being one-note. When you listen to the movie with this in mind ... Holy Cow. How did a director/actor combo as good as Nolan/Bale let this monotonous growling take over every line of Batman's? I kept hoping he would talk less. Bale is the anti-Maguire. I like him as Bruce Wayne, not so much in the costume. (I hated the choice of Maguire for Spider-Man, but I do give him credit as the voice of Spidey.) And I apologize if you haven't heard this complaint because I just ruined your next viewing of the movie.
The second bit of baggage going into the movie was the now popular idea that Batman = Bush. Or Cheney. Or some kind of right wing worldview. The vast majority of action movies have a bit of right wing aroma about them. Many of them rely on the idea that someone - Dirty Harry, Bruce Willis, Jack Bauer, whoever - has to break the rules in order to protect us. We can't protect ourselves and rules and regulations make for dull movies, just as villains who give up information without being tortured are kind of sissy villains. Usually I can write this stuff off. If your politics need to be expressed by someone in a costume, you need to re-examine your politics, not me.
Yet, in Dark Knight, the cell phone eavesdropping seemed plunked in solely to parallel Bush's illegal wire-tapping. I found myself muttering, "Well, at least Batman's eavesdropping was effective." Batman accepts the public's (rather sudden) hatred heroically. Bush's low approval rating is not a sign of his nobility, it's a sign of his suckiness. All of this made the sort of leaden speechifying at the end more grating than it needed to be. (There are other, more sensible, ways to interpret the movie if you really think it's worth taking the politics of Batman that seriously. Link via neilalien.)
