A Blog About Dark Knight: Someone Had To Do It

This is a copy of an email I wrote to my friend Christian. He's living in Prague for the year and only just got a chance to see "Temne Rytir," or as you may know it, "The Dark Knight." This is my response to his thoughts on the movie. I didn't include his email, because who cares? Plus he was wrong about some stuff and I'm always right.

"I think Heath was amazing. I was dazzled by every moment he spent on the screen. Totally creepy and showy in all the right ways. There were several moments where I wanted to start applauding but would have felt like a feggot (especially the pen scene).

I think the movie's script had problems, especially towards the end. I agree that the strong character they built for Wayne got neglected in this one. And I fuckin hate the Batman voice. It got worse this time and I just don't get it. It doesn't make sense and is really distracting.

Jake and I were talking about how any time these movies try to involve bystanders too much, it sucks for some reason. Like the people on the subway in Spiderman 2. For some reason the acting of all those small parts with the people on the two ferries sucked. Especially the asshole guy who wanted to take the boat of convicted criminals down. That idea was a little loose and gay too. And they tried to make the cops driving the armored truck getting shot at funny, but it just blew and was annoying.

I agree about the action too. Some stuff I loved (the bank robbery, the bat pod, the truck flip, the Japan thing), but a lot of those fights definitely leave something to be desired. And Jake and I think Cillian Murphy's face was superimposed in during that one scene, like what they did when Tony Soprano's mom died. Also, though it was a cool character in some ways, The Scarecrow was made into the biggest pussy of a villain I've ever seen. I liked the idea of bringing him back, but it was a let down. I could take him. Kevin Spacey and Parker Posey could give him a run for his money.

I think the main problem with the movie was it got way too "speechful" towards the end. Like, it had strong themes that revealed themselves really well throughout, like white knight vs. dark,corruption, and chaos vs. order and hypocrisy and stuff. But by the end everybody was just saying what they're philosophy was.

'My girlfriend got blown up. That's not fair. Now I'm really interested in chance.'

I think we dealt with the theme of chance more effectively in Games of Chance***. And I'm not being sarcastic. The struggle of Race overshadowing Games of Chance because his passion required skill... To me, that turmoil is much deeper and more subtle then what they gave Eckhart. I thought he and the Dent character were fine until the end, when they just had him talking about his character's motivation a lot. And when you think about it, Two Face kind of sucks. It's just the coin flip from No Country again and again. Plus everyone was making those shitty speeches about what they movie was about, like the audience couldn't be trusted to connect the dots themselves. Dent, Wayne, Gordon, even the Joker (though I loved the nurse thing).

Oh, and Freeman's moral objection to the phone tapping was gay. It was like, 'Hey, there's this guy who's trying to destroy an entire city, but we don't know where he is. However, I have this technology that can let us listen to phone calls and pinpoint his exact location, saving thousands of lives.' 'But what about privacy?'

And yeah, Gyllenballs was nasty. I was glad when they blew her up.

I'm seeing it again on Imax for Heath. He lit up the screen."




***This is a reference to "Race 2: Games of Chance," a movie we made in High School.