The Dark Knight
Re: The Dark Knight
I liked it. I think Ledger did a great job as the Joker, the story line was good, and they kept it fairly realistic, which was what I think made Batman Begins so good.
The bad was that they started to go a little more comic bookish than the first.
The bad was that they started to go a little more comic bookish than the first.
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Guest
Re: The Dark Knight
I'm going to see it in 2 days time but I'm a bit pissed off that my hero of almost 10 years and star of the film Christian Bale, has been arrested for allegedly assaulting his mother and sister in the Dorchester Hotel on Sunday night.....Say its not true Chrissy.... 
Re: The Dark Knight
If Heath Ledger doesn't get something from the Academy, I'll sic the Batman on them. His performance was hands down the best thing I've seen all year (granted, I don't go to the theater much, but still).
It's quite violent for a PG-13 movie, and I was surprised that a) Two Face was in it, and b) that they killed him off at the end. AND!! Rachel was killed off! Jeez!
I really need to see it again.
It's quite violent for a PG-13 movie, and I was surprised that a) Two Face was in it, and b) that they killed him off at the end. AND!! Rachel was killed off! Jeez!
I really need to see it again.
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Phoebe
Re: The Dark Knight
I wrote a really long, good review on the NYTimes website, but it only accepted 150 reviews and despite the fact that it says there are 176 (one of which is presumably mine) the invisible 26 entries submitted after the cutoff are lost to the world. So mad. I'll reproduce it. This whole thing below is spoilers for the movie so don't read it if you haven't seen it.
I came from the unique position of never before having seen a Batman movie (ANY Batman movie) nor read any of the comic books. Possibly as a result of this, I had some major complaints about the movie (which, however, I did think was an extremely good movie). First of all there was basically no character development. I've heard from a few people that "all the character development was in Batman Begins" but I've also heard "no, there was no character development in that either, it's just an action movie." Anyway, with the exception of Harvey Dent which is sort of less character development than . . . something else? all the characters are totally static and because of that I didn't really start being interested in them until enough time had literally gone by for me to develop some kind of affection, which was definitely possible in this very long movie. Despite the movie's length (usually I don't like movies to be very long) it at no time seemed TOO long to me and I stayed excited the whole time. So points for that. Moving on, I get that because it is from a comic book, the characters are sort of fixed but that is by no means the rule and there are lots of comic books w/ character development within.
My second major complaint (my biggest issue) was that there were just too many bombs. The three major circumstances in which bombs are used (Maggie + Harvey Dent; the hospital; the boats) use the idea of a bomb really well, and the cell phone bomb is kind of intriguingly surprising, if pretty gruesome, but by the end of the movie I didn't have any patience for the type of suspense created by a literal ticking bomb. I wish there had been more ingenious ways to kill people. That said I appreciated what I interpreted (maybe wrongfully, maybe it was just slapstick but whatever) the little nod to the superfluity of bombs when the Joker blows up the hospital and it's kind of lame, then we get a more exciting explosion. Igot fed up with the sort of instant drama that a ticking bomb creates. Finally, my last major complaint is the plot. To me, the plot seemed really, really thrown together in order to create these particular dramatic moments. Almost as if the writers came up with individual ideas for scenes/events (switching hostages, the two boats not blowing each other up, flipping a tractor trailer over on LaSalle) and then wrote plot around each element and then wrote an overarching plot to incorporate all of that. I get that in a long movie the plot has to be kind of varied but for example "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" was about as long with a one track plot and wasn't at all boring.
Obviously the acting is really, really good. Heath Ledger is soooo good, I never was any particular fan of his but I just cannot believe how well he acts in this role. I was expecting it to be good, but like everyone else is saying, we went in with really high expectations yet they were exceeded!
I'm not sure why Maggie Gyllenhaal is getting so many rave reviews, needless to say I really like her acting, but the part is so small. I don't usually get on the feminist thing but why couldn't she have a larger part? I don't mind seeing her get rescued (Batman jumping out the window after her is one of the coolest moments in the film) but I just wish she had been in the movie a little bit more. Oh, I totally predicted the Joker's switching around. Go me. I also was really interested to see that the boats thing played out the way I imagined it might.
I think that's probably it for my thoughts. To me pretty much the coolest part of the movie was seeing Chicago in it. The NYTimes review says Gotham City is "a cleverly disguised Chicago" but it's not real disguised. All of the car scenes take place under the El (that beige metal looking overpass thing above the roads) and Batman drives his motorbike right through Millennium Station! That was such a great image. Go Chicago. One unintentionally funny thing was that, when the ferry and the convict boat are leaving from the pier (In reality there is not a ferry), you can see that it's Navy Pier but you can't see any of the things on Navy Pier, which is basically like if you took the concept of commercialism and tackiness and consolidated that big concept into a five block long pier covered with overpriced boutiques, ferris wheels and franchises. Also we spotted a Lyric Opera poster and my friend saw a CTA bus w/ an extra line on it to make it read "GTA." A nice perk for Chicago dwellers. I wasn't here last summer when it was being filmed but they really closed the road off to flip over a truck on it in the middle of the night, I hear.
I also really liked the ending (not so much the plot, which, again, I thought was random and cobbled together, but thematically), and I especially liked the line about either dying a hero or living long enough to become the villain. (Buffy did both!) This was less concise that what I wrote on the NYTimes website, I can't believe how long I have gone on about Batman so I must have enjoyed it a lot despite all its flaws that I have just described!
I came from the unique position of never before having seen a Batman movie (ANY Batman movie) nor read any of the comic books. Possibly as a result of this, I had some major complaints about the movie (which, however, I did think was an extremely good movie). First of all there was basically no character development. I've heard from a few people that "all the character development was in Batman Begins" but I've also heard "no, there was no character development in that either, it's just an action movie." Anyway, with the exception of Harvey Dent which is sort of less character development than . . . something else? all the characters are totally static and because of that I didn't really start being interested in them until enough time had literally gone by for me to develop some kind of affection, which was definitely possible in this very long movie. Despite the movie's length (usually I don't like movies to be very long) it at no time seemed TOO long to me and I stayed excited the whole time. So points for that. Moving on, I get that because it is from a comic book, the characters are sort of fixed but that is by no means the rule and there are lots of comic books w/ character development within.
My second major complaint (my biggest issue) was that there were just too many bombs. The three major circumstances in which bombs are used (Maggie + Harvey Dent; the hospital; the boats) use the idea of a bomb really well, and the cell phone bomb is kind of intriguingly surprising, if pretty gruesome, but by the end of the movie I didn't have any patience for the type of suspense created by a literal ticking bomb. I wish there had been more ingenious ways to kill people. That said I appreciated what I interpreted (maybe wrongfully, maybe it was just slapstick but whatever) the little nod to the superfluity of bombs when the Joker blows up the hospital and it's kind of lame, then we get a more exciting explosion. Igot fed up with the sort of instant drama that a ticking bomb creates. Finally, my last major complaint is the plot. To me, the plot seemed really, really thrown together in order to create these particular dramatic moments. Almost as if the writers came up with individual ideas for scenes/events (switching hostages, the two boats not blowing each other up, flipping a tractor trailer over on LaSalle) and then wrote plot around each element and then wrote an overarching plot to incorporate all of that. I get that in a long movie the plot has to be kind of varied but for example "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" was about as long with a one track plot and wasn't at all boring.
Obviously the acting is really, really good. Heath Ledger is soooo good, I never was any particular fan of his but I just cannot believe how well he acts in this role. I was expecting it to be good, but like everyone else is saying, we went in with really high expectations yet they were exceeded!
I'm not sure why Maggie Gyllenhaal is getting so many rave reviews, needless to say I really like her acting, but the part is so small. I don't usually get on the feminist thing but why couldn't she have a larger part? I don't mind seeing her get rescued (Batman jumping out the window after her is one of the coolest moments in the film) but I just wish she had been in the movie a little bit more. Oh, I totally predicted the Joker's switching around. Go me. I also was really interested to see that the boats thing played out the way I imagined it might.
I think that's probably it for my thoughts. To me pretty much the coolest part of the movie was seeing Chicago in it. The NYTimes review says Gotham City is "a cleverly disguised Chicago" but it's not real disguised. All of the car scenes take place under the El (that beige metal looking overpass thing above the roads) and Batman drives his motorbike right through Millennium Station! That was such a great image. Go Chicago. One unintentionally funny thing was that, when the ferry and the convict boat are leaving from the pier (In reality there is not a ferry), you can see that it's Navy Pier but you can't see any of the things on Navy Pier, which is basically like if you took the concept of commercialism and tackiness and consolidated that big concept into a five block long pier covered with overpriced boutiques, ferris wheels and franchises. Also we spotted a Lyric Opera poster and my friend saw a CTA bus w/ an extra line on it to make it read "GTA." A nice perk for Chicago dwellers. I wasn't here last summer when it was being filmed but they really closed the road off to flip over a truck on it in the middle of the night, I hear.
I also really liked the ending (not so much the plot, which, again, I thought was random and cobbled together, but thematically), and I especially liked the line about either dying a hero or living long enough to become the villain. (Buffy did both!) This was less concise that what I wrote on the NYTimes website, I can't believe how long I have gone on about Batman so I must have enjoyed it a lot despite all its flaws that I have just described!
Re: The Dark Knight
Batman Begins was the origin story, so it does the character development there. It's not really a lot of character development, as this is a comic book action movie, but you get to see why he is who he is.
As far as all the bombs go, that's pretty much standard for movies nowadays. I seriously think that when movies get pitched, it goes something like this, "Ok, there's an explosion, followed by another explosion, followed by a chase scene with explosions, followed by another explosion, followed by another chase scene with explosions, then theres a love scene where they make love while being chased all the while explosions are going off. Finally the hero wins by killing the bad guy with an explosion after another chase scene."
In this movie it's more appropriate, though. Joker is an anarchist. He isn't interested in money or power or love, only chaos. He found the best way to create chaos is to blow things up.
As far as all the bombs go, that's pretty much standard for movies nowadays. I seriously think that when movies get pitched, it goes something like this, "Ok, there's an explosion, followed by another explosion, followed by a chase scene with explosions, followed by another explosion, followed by another chase scene with explosions, then theres a love scene where they make love while being chased all the while explosions are going off. Finally the hero wins by killing the bad guy with an explosion after another chase scene."
In this movie it's more appropriate, though. Joker is an anarchist. He isn't interested in money or power or love, only chaos. He found the best way to create chaos is to blow things up.
Because this is a show about Batman, not Rachel. She had a larger role in Batman Begins, but she was a bigger part of the plot.I'm not sure why Maggie Gyllenhaal is getting so many rave reviews, needless to say I really like her acting, but the part is so small. I don't usually get on the feminist thing but why couldn't she have a larger part?
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Re: The Dark Knight
I enjoyed it, which I was surprised about since I am usually a marvel person. Heath Ledger did a very good job as the joker. In general I found it to be a fun action movie almost bondish due to batman's tendency to use crazy tech. Had the female "lead" been named something like Pussy Galore then they could have just called it a bond movie where bond went bat.
oh also batman == angel (or possibly the other way around)
spoilers
one thing that surprised me was the way they chose to end it, which might be a difference between how marvel does movies and how dc does. They seemed to close everything up (though i think two-face will come back). And did not overtly set up the next villain. I went to see it with someone who had and he made a point of pointing out the question mark on the bomb's belly indicating that riddler had teamed up with the joker. That is realtively subtle though compared to...
spiderman - spiderman kills green goblin, end of movie hobgoblin is created
spiderman 2 - kills doc oc and the following villains are introduced: lizard (unrealized) venom, and hobgoblin (still waiting in the wings)
I mean it could be due to my lesser knowledge of the dc universe but to the casual observer it looks like the tied the end up nicely.
oh also batman == angel (or possibly the other way around)
spoilers
one thing that surprised me was the way they chose to end it, which might be a difference between how marvel does movies and how dc does. They seemed to close everything up (though i think two-face will come back). And did not overtly set up the next villain. I went to see it with someone who had and he made a point of pointing out the question mark on the bomb's belly indicating that riddler had teamed up with the joker. That is realtively subtle though compared to...
spiderman - spiderman kills green goblin, end of movie hobgoblin is created
spiderman 2 - kills doc oc and the following villains are introduced: lizard (unrealized) venom, and hobgoblin (still waiting in the wings)
I mean it could be due to my lesser knowledge of the dc universe but to the casual observer it looks like the tied the end up nicely.
Last edited by olthar on Wed Jul 30, 2008 10:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: The Dark Knight
So I thought it had good themes, like, what is a hero? what kind of hero is needed? what motivates people for good or bad? what would push a good person to evil?
But my issue was that they beat the themes to death. I'm glad that they gave the appropriate weight to whats-her-face's death, but for the love of god, who edited this movie? I could have made it 40 minutes shorter and not so damn repetitive.
I appreciated doing things out-of-the-box so to speak, such as killing whats-her-name and burning her letter instead of giving it to him, and the whole deal of her choosing whats-his-face anyway. It was good stuff, but overshadowed by the fact that the whole movie, though interesting, borded on boring me by being too long and saying the same stuff over and over again. If I could count the number of times they used the word 'hero'....
However, movie was worth it for joker dressed as nurse. Hysterical. Also, the person I saw it with comented that it had the most plot of any batman movie, and when I think back to other batman movies, I suppose that's true.
Fav character? Alfred. He rocked. He was the hero! for burning that letter.
But my issue was that they beat the themes to death. I'm glad that they gave the appropriate weight to whats-her-face's death, but for the love of god, who edited this movie? I could have made it 40 minutes shorter and not so damn repetitive.
I appreciated doing things out-of-the-box so to speak, such as killing whats-her-name and burning her letter instead of giving it to him, and the whole deal of her choosing whats-his-face anyway. It was good stuff, but overshadowed by the fact that the whole movie, though interesting, borded on boring me by being too long and saying the same stuff over and over again. If I could count the number of times they used the word 'hero'....
However, movie was worth it for joker dressed as nurse. Hysterical. Also, the person I saw it with comented that it had the most plot of any batman movie, and when I think back to other batman movies, I suppose that's true.
Fav character? Alfred. He rocked. He was the hero! for burning that letter.
Last bumped by Anonymous on Thu May 12, 2011 10:35 am.