so, the big news as of late, the dark knight and everyone freaking the fuck out about it. now. granted, i loved the dark knight, and it's a fucking great movie, one of the best ones to come out in recent years. however, what i'm unhappy about are all the fucking posers and the general hysteria surrounding the whole thing. that is, people who wouldn't have given 2 shits about the movie if heath ledger was still alive and/or people who are speaking about the thing like it's the best movie of all time. it's got a 9.4 with 150,000 + votes right now on imdb, which makes it #1 by like .3 of a point. come on now, that's absurd. of course i loved the dark knight, i'm pretty much the target audience for christ's sake, 24 year old violence-obsessed male, comic book nerd, movie nerd, huge man crush on christian bale, lover of chris nolan, but i'd never for a second pretend that it's the best movie ever made and talk about it in that way. yes, heath ledger's performance was amazing and will go down in the annals of movie history as one of the great villain performances, however, call back in 6 months after you've watched gangs of new york and silence of the lambs and the dark knight in quick succession and tell me if you think ledger's performance is significantly better than daniel day-lewis' or anthony hopkins. and of course its not. the dark knight is good, very good, maybe the best comic book movie ever made, but its not so much better than every other comic book movie so as to blow the competition away. i watched v for vendetta the other day (an alan moore graphic novel), and the dark knight is not a whole lot better than V, or its own predecessor, batman begins. i mean, have you seen the godfather lately? what about pulp fiction, goodfellas, shawshank or the departed? you're going to legitimately say that a studio film that's rated pg-13 and includes a shit-ton of hokey dialogue because of the fact that when its boiled down to its essence the dark knight was intended to make money, and a lot of it, for warner brothers is better or even as good as any one of those films? come on now. that's just silly. the dark knight is a certain kind of film, and very well may be the pinnacle of this certain kind of film, but no matter how good it may be compared to its genre-mates, this type of film can never possibly be as good as a film that is r-rated and made for artistry's sake rather than for a studio cornerstone. that's just the reality of the thing, and it just kind of bothers me when everyone acts so ridiculous about something just because its brand new. everyone has a tendency to do that about everything, no matter what it is. because it's new, it's the best ever made/done/accomplished, no matter what may have come before. i guess what i'm getting at is that the general hysteria over the dark knight quasi ruined what should have been a great experience for me. it's no fun when posers are into it, it really isn't... not to sound like a snob or anything, but really. was heath ledger's performance amazing? absolutely. the joker as played by him goes right up there with bill the butcher and hannibal lector in my book. is the dark knight amazing? of course, i loved it. i give it like a 9... straight up. it's an incredible achievement, and like i said, probably the best a movie of that genre can possibly be, but at the same time i recognize that a movie like "the dark knight" can only be so good, because of the inherent limitations that go along with making a movie of that stature (it's a studio cornerstone, it has to be pg-13 so the little shitbricks with strict parents can see it, you can only do certain things when the studio is giving you $120 million to make a film, that's just how the world works). not that i really have anything against a movie being rated pg-13, but really, a psychopathic killer has a conversation with a bunch of crime figures and no one says "fuck" once? come on now, that's absurd. life, as i've said many times, is r-rated, whether suburban parents like it or not. i can almost guarantee that no one in the world has worse language than cops and robbers, except for maybe anyone in an all-male locker room or in the military. so it just seems fake to me when a movie dealing primarily with grown men who are in high stress life and death situations are speaking ad nauseum without a single hard swear word. that's a huge complaint of mine… when movies that would be 10X better as a hard r-rated film are cleaned up so goody goody parents don't bitch to the studio about little jimmy hearing a word his dad probably says 10X every day at home anyway. it just figures, everyone's always worried about what's going on outside... when if you run your household right from the inside, it won't even be an issue... but i'll let south park generally speak for me on that issue. -- (oh, by the by, if you're curious and would like to know what my favorite scene is, it's when the joker is egging on that cop in the interrogation room and explaining the nuances of killing someone with a knife, and how you know more about people when they're about to die. "so you could say i knew your friends better than you did... would you like to know which ones were cowards?" i love it, but then again i have a thing for the unredeemably dastardly)
--> in another aside, i like to think that the 2nd story the joker gives about his scars is the true one. if his father fucked him up, that's almost an excuse, a crutch if you will, and it makes him a lesser sort of evil. if, however, what's happened to him is due to his own hand, then it makes him a force of nature, a man who lives by his own code, who simply "wants to watch the world burn".
--> in my last batman aside, i have one particular complaint about the "batman" as we've grown to know him from cinema. in the comics, batman is just as renowned for his brilliance as he is for his physical skills. there's a reason why a glorified MMA fighter is a key member of the justice league, and that's that besides just being the peak of human physical achievement, bruce wayne is a brilliant detective and one of the world's best tacticians who can basically plan and counterplan for anything you throw at him. i feel this side of the batman mystique is downplayed at the expense of some cool action scenes.
so, i don't know if i've talked about this before.. but it's a theorem of mine, closely followed by its opposite and reverse, that being, of course, the "Beatles/Godfather effect". now, you may call it whatever you want given your own personal experience, but it basically is the name for the situation that evolves when you've heard so much hyperbolic praise of a movie/band/book, whatever, that when you finally partake in that experience which you've missed for whatever reason, you're inevitably disappointed just because everything you've heard is so damned over the top. now, me, (if you can't tell by my blog) i'm obsessed with movies, obviously, and i got really really into them at some point late in high school/early in college. well, having been seriously into movies for quite sometime, i found that my favorite genre (as many people's is), happens to be mob movies and those dealing with the complex morality plays presented by organized crime. however, i had not yet seen the godfather, for whatever reason. so of course everyone was talking about how i absolutely HAD to watch the godfather and all of this, and how its 10X better than goodfellas, etc, etc. well, i watch it, and i'm inevitably disappointed. nothing, and i mean nothing, can possibly live up to endless praise and the anticipation which such praise builds. not that i don't like the godfather films, i thoroughly enjoy them, its just that... i was disappointed when i first saw the film, and you know what they say, first impressions last a lifetime. same thing goes for music and the beatles. so i guess the moral of the story is... don't needlessly jack off something (ahem, ahem, dark knight), because you never know who's experience you're going to ruin by rattling on like a schoolgirl with a crush. but, anyway, the whole "beatles/godfather effect" is a negative thing, i'm talking about its positive cousin, that is, having experienced the disappointment accompanying hyperbolic praise, you temper your expectations expecting latent disappointment, and instead experience surprise at the quality of what you're experiencing. this has happened to me this summer in the shape of one nerdy awesome-fest, being: battlestar galactica. now, i had sworn off sci-fi following the shit-fest that was the first three chapters of the star wars saga, decrying the loss of a quality genre to a love of special effects and cgi. and low and behold, who comes to lead me from the darkness but jaime escalante himself, james edward olmos, and his favored companion, miss stands with a fist, mary mcconnell. now, i've heard nothing but good things about BSG for several years now, claims that it rescued sci-fi and such things, and my dad has been raving about the exploits of adama and crew for years. so, seeing as how i'm having the summer of your average 6th grader, i signed up for netflix and decided, what the hell, lets give BSG a shot. so i watch the miniseries, and, well, needless to say, i was completely blown away. far from being the best sci-fi show i've ever seen, it may well be the best show period i've ever seen. sure, it's set on a spaceship, but that's just the setting, if it's a good story it's a good story, whether its set on a desert island, a spaceship, someone's mind or 1750. it's a story of (very) ordinary people rising to face extraordinary challenges in a completely ordinary way, which is something i'm into and is the main reason i got into lost. i'm going to straight up say it, bsg is better than lost. am i a nerd? absolutely. however, bsg features many of the best characters i've ever encountered on a basic cable tv show (you don't get to count HBO. your shows don't play by the same rules) and delves into issues more suited for an upper level philosophy class than a television show. give the miniseries a watch, i promise you won't be disappointed. oh, by the way, the "beatles/godfather effect"'s positive cousin also applies to netflix. its everything i ever could have expected and then some. i love it. if you play your cards right, you can get 3 DVDs a week. 2-3 DVDs a week = 8-10 a month, for $9/mo? yeah, suck it blockbuster.
i've got more shit to say, i just feel like this post is long enough. i'll be back, soon enough.
