What am I more excited about? The Batpod? Ledger's joker- a psychopathic misfits fan with Chicago accenting his voice from behind his nose? Or that Chicago-cum-Gotham itself-- the boyhood home of the Nolan boys, a city they apparently see, as I do, to be our nation's most achingly poetic? It's an unanswerable question. Whatever the case, I can't wait for the 12:15 matinee.
Still, perhaps two years after it was first released, the above image still defines my expectations for this movie. Nothing in the trailers I've seen or previews I've read contradicts it tonally- in fact, those original inferences have mostly just been deepened and refined. And that's a good thing.
UPDATE: Yeah, it was great. Ledger was very good- didn't change my life or anything, but I guess if he wins an oscar he'll deserve it more than most. He was a good actor.
I spent the last third of the movie naggingly distracted by something I read this morning in Dana Stephens's review- a too-clever-by-half comparison of Batman to George W. Bush.
Fallacious parallels between reality in fiction are sort of the problem with that guy in the first place, aren't they? In other words, our president's problem isn't so much that he's like Batman, it's that he thinks he's like Batman and that this supposed similarity justifies his decisions. But an important part of the point of a character like batman is that he is wholly fictional-- a psychologic totem, an ethic manifest-- not only not a real person, but not of a real world. Batman's world exists for one and one purpose only: to test him so that he may overcome and so be more his true batman self. I don't envy our president the choices he's had to make but that doesn't make it any less clear that he's made them the wrong way-- something Batman is incapable of doing in any meaningful sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment