24 November 2011

Choking on Popcorn Just to Avoid The Ending

I have just given myself a headache within two hours flat. It wasn't for the want of screaming at white noise with sandpaper allowing itself to scrape the back of the neck that connects to the spinal column. 


It was because I watched The Dark Knight.


Batman returns, shows up, goes for a holiday, comes back again, fills out invoices for a firm in Chepstow that deal in double glazing and patio re-decoration. Often the more flimsy characters in these films ask "Who is he?" I only ask "What is the point of him?"


Christopher Nolan's second interpretation of this sodden Story (a capital S is used for its self-confessed biblical qualities) was all that the year 2008 could harp on about. The next installment is going to do the same next year, and probably early into the year after that. 


First of all, the bull in the room. Or indeed the bull in the room that committed hari-kari in an American hotel room in early 2008. In this film he did what the Hollywood machine wanted him to do - one big blast and then boom! He's gone. The written requiems thereafter were almost automated and the posters put on walls of him saying "Why so serious?" went up quicker than the production of Blu-Tac could have ever anticipated.


His first major scene, reminiscent of the one Jack Nicholson pulled out of the saddle on his one trick pony in the 1989 film, is one where he comes out of a restaurant kitchen. He murders someone gruesomely, he makes idle threats at some terribly one-dimensional gangster characters, and then returns back into the kitchen. I never knew that a ham could walk out of a kitchen by itself and then go straight back in there without being cooked in between.


Really, after that Ledger just gets absorbed into Nolan's nik-nak of a plot. (Ledger would have been surely happier absorbed in his own Hollywood plot.) Violence begats violence. And not in the Biff Bang Pow sense. More like the put-put-put of guns shattering the pain-glass windows of Chicago's skyscrapers. And inside those skyscrapers is the completely out of sync plot of Establishment good trying to get rid of Establishment bad, which as the film goes on starts to stink of the Joker's off ham acting. 


Aaron Eckhart was put in this film for the celluloid to accommodate his massive jaw and hair-straightened blonde hair. His character, his motive, his complete ineptitude for having a plan B were all equally astounding. The motivation point for him to turn into Two-Face was as flimsy as the Joker pointlessly blowing up a hospital at the expense of a budget that could give medical aid to a real hospital.


The human sideways glance that is Maggie Gyllenhaal was put in because I assume someone had to best Nicole Kidman for awful Batman love interests. (By the way, do bats have sex with piss-poor Hollywood actors, normally?) Gyllenhaal has played a similar part in movies before. In the Oliver Stone let-down "World Trade Centre" her role was ranked number 20 behind another list of characters (where in that instance Mohammed Atta was number one). In this little number though she flitted about the sewn up scenes aiding nobody in particular in the search for the plan B.


A scourge of the modern remakes of the Batman franchise was the Batman himself. Christian Bales into significance in this massive mistake of a set-piece. He is lost inexorably in plot holes that are too frequent to mention (for instance, after he saves Gyllenhaal from having a death cab for cutie, why does he not go back up into his own property and dispense of The Ham?) In fact when he turns up as Bruce Wayne he seems like the oily cunt persona he played in American Psycho. Worse still, in the linear catastrophe of what is the final cut of this movie he seems utterly superfluous to the many enemies that wax and wane this story. Oh, and his Batmobile has fat tyres. 


There were honestly only about three scenes in this film full of MANY that caught my attention. I am not a person with slow learning difficulties. The promotional people at Time Warner are neither. But they've made your admittance fee, the Blu-Ray DVD fee, and the enduring, sagging memories of actors who heroically and quite possibly sado-masochistically died in the making of this film seem like a comic book. 

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