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The Dark Knight clocks in
I went and watched Batman last night. I find myself on the defensive after looking over Duncan's review again. So I must have liked the movie over all. Most importantly, despite what Duncan suggests, I could see pretty clearly what was going on during the action scenes and found them to be pretty exciting. Batman's kind of a lumbering hulk and doesn't have a lot of variety in his arsenal of punches and kicks. I never thought I'd appreciate the obligatory action movie box-of-rocks camera technique but it kind of worked well in this movie, lending Batman some much needed dynamism without completely confusing the event sequence. Thinking over Duncan's comment as to whether the movie "simplifies and trivializes" its moral subject matter, I agree to a certain extent. The themes of terrorism and altruism dealt with in the movie certainly need to be represented in a way that's more respectfully applicable to our current global crises. But it's hard to imagine a mainstream movie that delivers a world so sophisticated as that. I liked the ambiguous resolution of the conflict between anarchy and moral order. And I liked that that resolution was embodied in a figure that can't possibly exist in real world society. If you're gonna have a cop out at least dress it up in a rubber animal suit and have it drive off into oblivion on a tractorcycle. I mean a good superhero should always be pointed out in the end as an impossible solution.— July 30, 2008 11:28 a.m.
The Dark Knight clocks in
I love this forum, totally underused. I've been feeling bad for Duncan's torch-bearing efforts for like 8 or so years now. He's one of the last film critics I know of to actually draw from a lot of the experimentation in film that went on in the sixties and seventies: not just inventing new ways of making films but also inventing new ways of appreciating them. All the rule-breaking and theorizing and obsession that enriched the potential effectiveness of movies forever after. I remember seeing his reviews when I was a kid and laughing at him as the reviewer that didn't like anything. Now I see him as pretty much like a canary in a coalmine. His health and general disposition monitored collectively (it must be a hard knot of followers to have kept him in print this long) via this weekly checkup. Duncan, I wish you'd write a book already. As for Batman, I'm excited to see it. Probably because I grew up during the "darkening" age of comics (the trend having broken ground in the 80's with Moore's Watchmen and Miller's Dark Knight Returns among lots more). Maybe I'm used to my subtext being packaged up and delivered in rubberized collisions of spandex and face paint.— July 29, 2008 1:20 p.m.