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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 1, 2017 22:23:29 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 15, 2017 22:13:39 GMT
Manohla Dargis lengthy review from The New York Times: Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind-
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Talent played a considerable part in Mr. Nolan’s Bat restoration, naturally, as did his seriousness of purpose. He brought a gravitas to the superhero that wiped away the camp and kitsch that had shrouded Batman in cobwebs. It helped that Christian Bale, a reluctant smiler whose sharply planed face looks as if it had been carved with a chisel, slid into Bruce Wayne’s insouciance as easily as he did Batman’s suit.
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Mr. Nolan has turned Batman (again played by the sturdy, stoic Mr. Bale) into a villain’s sidekick.
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Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once.
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With his eyes dimmed and voice technologically obscured, Mr. Bale, who’s suited up from the start, doesn’t have access to an actor’s most expressive tools... Mr. Nolan ... initially doesn’t appear motivated to advance the character. Yet by giving him rivals in love and war, he has also shifted Batman’s demons from inside his head to the outside world. ... This is a darker Batman, less obviously human, more strangely other. When he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a savior. There’s a touch of demon in his stealthy menace.
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No matter how cynical you feel about Hollywood, it is hard not to fall for a film that makes room for a shot of the Joker leaning out the window of a stolen police car and laughing into the wind, the city’s colored lights gleaming behind him like jewels. He’s just a clown in black velvet, but he’s also some kind of masterpiece.
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Post by RhodoraO on May 21, 2017 13:56:41 GMT
A great analysis from Village Voice casting the happenings of the film against the post 9/11 political climate:
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 12, 2018 4:28:39 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 21, 2020 6:40:07 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 3, 2021 19:55:47 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 3, 2021 20:12:16 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 26, 2021 0:01:24 GMT
I really loved this incisive review of The Dark Knight after its release, from WSJ. It's neither positive, nor negative, but fiercely objective and reads certain things about the movie as well as its impact on the audiences (it was very early to measure its legacy back then, so a few things you guys will not agree with): Too precious not to paste. A must read: www.wsj.com/articles/SB121686395131479737Too Far From Escapism By Allen Barra July 24, 2008 12:01 am ET Director Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight," currently on track to be the biggest box-office smash of the year and maybe of all time, crosses a line that perhaps did not need to be crossed, the fantasy-into-reality line. Nothing illustrates how much movies have changed over the past 20 years than to compare Tim Burton's "Batman" (1989) with Mr. Nolan's "The Dark Knight." The Burton film, starring Michael Keaton as Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, was photographed in garish, neon-noir colors in a gargoyle-infested neo-gothic city designed by the late Anton Furst. The action was highlighted by Danny Elfman's rousing pop-Wagnerian score. In contrast, Mr. Nolan's movie drains the fantasy element from the material. Gotham City bears a striking resemblance to Chicago, where some scenes were filmed, as photographed in shades of black, green and drab industrial gray. Gone are the Batcave and "stately Wayne manor." Bruce Wayne lives in a penthouse, and the closest thing to a cave is an underground garage where he tests high-tech weapons with his armorer (Morgan Freeman). The Batmobile is banished, replaced by an assault vehicle -- a high-speed tank, really. The minimalist score by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer evokes not exhilaration but dread. All color, lyricism, and virtually any humor that doesn't partake of the macabre is gone from this Batman story. There isn't even a hint that this PG-13 film might be suitable for youngsters, as many parents of distraught preteens have discovered. The Joker's psychotic brutality -- he impales one character on a pencil and in a shocking scene blows one of the franchise's leading female characters to smithereens -- makes a mockery of the rating system. What, then, is "The Dark Knight"'s near-fanatical audience responding to? To Heath Ledger's Joker, of course. Mr. Ledger's character has clearly touched some national nerve, and it will be interesting to see how the rest of the world responds to the film after the initial wave of hype has passed. "The Dark Knight" isn't simply another superhero movie. In fact, taken on its own terms, it's really not a superhero movie at all: It's a supervillain movie, and the many critics and fans who are calling for Mr. Ledger to be nominated for an Academy Award are reading the film correctly -- they want him nominated for best actor, not best supporting actor. This Joker is the most thoroughly principled and incorruptible character in modern movies. He doesn't care about money -- he contemptuously burns a pile of cash containing millions of dollars -- and, unlike Mr. Nicholson's Joker, he doesn't even care about power. He consolidates the various mobs of Gotham City merely as a means to his end, which, contrary to numerous editorials we are seeing, isn't terrorism. Terrorists, in their hearts, believe that they are really the good guys; Mr. Ledger's Joker has no such illusions. He's a nihilist whose avowed purpose is to disrupt society by corrupting and destroying its heroes -- Batman and Aaron Eckhart's straight-arrow D.A., Harvey Dent. In the most unsettling scene ever presented in an action movie, Christian Bale's Batman is left to interrogate the Joker in a police lock-down room while the police simply watch. Mr. Ledger snickers, leers and goads Batman into beating him up -- thus violating his civil rights, which is precisely what the Joker wants Batman to do. It's a stunning victory for the villain that makes Batman seem helpless and foolish. This is the first time I've ever seen a superhero humiliated like this in his own movie. "The Dark Knight" seems to be telling us that, ultimately, we're completely helpless against any characters as ruthless and ideologically pure as the Joker. We can't even win by becoming vigilantes -- that's what the Jokers of this world want us to be. Although pop-artists such as Frank Miller (creator of the "Batman: The Dark Knight Returns" series) and Mr. Nolan (who also directed the previous Batman film, "Batman Begins") are undeniably gifted creators of images, the film is a bleak reminder of the limits of comic-book literature when it comes to dealing with serious themes. "Some men," says Michael Caine's Alfred the Butler to Bruce Wayne, "aren't looking for anything logical, like money. Some just want to watch the world burn." Is the only alternative to become as merciless as your opponent? It's a dilemma that leaves Batman and his fans in the dark. The mania that "The Dark Knight" has touched off in a certain segment of the movie-going audience -- and it's not hyperbole to call it mania when people are going to eBay and paying up to $100 each for Imax tickets and $229 for action figures -- is reminiscent of the nuttiness exhibited by American teens in 1955 when "Rebel Without a Cause" was released after James Dean was killed in an auto accident. Media pundits who ask if Heath Ledger's death has anything to do with the obsession surrounding this movie know that the answer is yes. But there is another, more troubling, aspect to this part of the story. We know that Mr. Ledger died of an overdose of prescription drugs after a period of insomnia and acute depression. What we see on the screen in "The Dark Knight" -- as we are plunged into a netherworld that provides no escape from its brutal realities -- may well be a projection of Mr. Ledger's inner torment as he tried to fight those afflictions: a portrait of a Method actor who could not keep a proper distance from his role, an artist who stared too long into the abyss and saw a twisted, drug-addled death mask staring back at him. (This past weekend, Christian Bale was arrested then released on bail following charges of assault from his mother and sister; "The Dark Knight" must present one heck of an abyss.) We know enough about how involved actors can be in their roles to see that this idea is not far-fetched. Does that make "The Dark Knight" a $180 million-plus snuff film? Give that a thought before you plunk your $229 down for that action figure."
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Post by RhodoraO on Jan 26, 2021 5:52:11 GMT
Interesting short review by Joe Morgentsen of WSJ (18 July, 2008). Love the Bale mention here: www.wsj.com/articles/SB121632327909562803Toward the end of "The Dark Knight," the Joker -- the movie's animating force, thanks to a startling performance by the late Heath Ledger -- sets up what he calls a social experiment that's meant to show the malign essence of human nature. (The outcome may or may not surprise you.) The whole movie is a social experiment on a global scale, an ambitious, lavish attempt to see if audiences will turn out for a comic-book epic that goes beyond darkness into Stygian bleakness, grim paradox, endless betrayals and pervasive corruption. All of the early signs -- not just the ritual ravings of fanboys -- say that vast numbers of people will. But they may sustain lots more punishment than they signed up for. Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note. A great deal of the anticipation surrounding the film has sprung from the hope that Heath Ledger's role in it (his penultimate performance, since he'll be seen in a Terry Gilliam film scheduled for next year) would turn out to be something memorable. That hope has been rewarded more fully than anyone familiar with his previous work might have imagined. His portrait of the Joker owes nothing to Jack Nicholson, even though that in itself is hard to imagine. This knife-wielding psychopath isn't jaunty, but hunched and frowzy. His mirthless grin isn't fixed, but the lipstick smear of a crazy street lady. He moves with Peter Lorre's furtiveness, speaks in a bright, crisp voice that seems to channel Jack Lemmon, and licks his scarred chops with a frequency that suggests heavy doses of anti-depressives. If the stories he tells about those scars are contradictory, they are never less than creepily entertaining. He's the best-written character in the script, but it's Ledger's eerie fervor that plumbs the depths of the Joker's derangement. Elsewhere in the film, entertainment is a function of one's appetite for shock (the elaborate action sequences are pounding but arrhythmic, like extended cardiac seizures) and a kind of awe at the spectacle of a city seized by unremitting evil. The Gotham City of Mr. Nolan's "Batman Begins" was no slouch as sinkholes go, but "The Dark Knight" turns it into a moral Sargasso. ("This town," the Joker jokes, "deserves a better class of criminals.") There's never any doubt about the movie's deadly seriousness, or its airless complexity. The script, which the director wrote with his brother, Jonathan Nolan, could be the syllabus for a civics class in a dark-matter universe. Every motive is mixed. Every effort to banish criminals has unintended consequences. Batman's psychic scars are mirrored by those of the Joker, while his lofty ambitions and grievous failings find their counterparts in Harvey Dent. He's the tight-jawed district attorney played by Aaron Eckhart, who also plays the hideously, and finally tediously, deformed Two-Face. (Both of those incarnations flip a coin fatefully in the fashion of Javier Bardem's monster in "No Country For Old Men," except that this coin has two heads, so what's the point?) The Dark Knight of the title is played, as in "Batman Begins," by Christian Bale, an actor of such intensity that his smolder would be another star's blaze. Maggie Gyllenhaal is a welcome replacement for Katie Holmes as the assistant D.A. Rachel Dawes, but Rachel remains a hard case to care about because her feelings for Harvey and Bruce Wayne are so fraught with ambiguity. Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman are back as, respectively, Bruce's butler and the CEO of his business empire. So is Gary Oldman as the upright police lieutenant Jim Gordon. The production outbonds Bond with technology that includes a new Batsuit made of titanium-dipped triweave fiber (so Bruce can turn his head), a two-wheeled vehicle called a Bat-Pod (they couldn't call it an iPod and they didn't want to call it a motorcycle) and a new Batmobile that looks to be less than brilliant when it comes to gas mileage. Quick shots of the control panel show two of the car's operating modes to be Loiter and Intimidate. The movie's main mode is Suffocate.
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 27, 2022 23:25:53 GMT
A brief but very beautiful, incisive piece on TDK by Jonathan Majors, 21 DEC '22: variety.com/2022/film/news/jonathan-majors-the-dark-knight-best-films-1235464101/"[This essay is one of several contributed by filmmakers and actors as part of Variety’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time package.] “And here we go,” a simple line spoken like a prayer from one of the most complex characters to ever grace the silver screen, Heath Ledger’s Joker, in Christopher Nolan’s film “The Dark Knight.” Let’s paint the picture: 2008, Dallas, Texas, 18-year-old me, my high school sweetheart, and her very, very cool father. The three of us, popcorn in hand, Cokes and candies in tow, and lest I forget to mention, it’s a midnight showing and my very first midnight showing ever. We settle in, get cozy, and what transpires between that screen and my 18-year-old self to this day is remembered and recalled with the vigor of youth and tenacity of self-exploration. So, “here we go.” Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is one of those rare films that entertains at the highest cinematic rung while simultaneously challenging its audience with each frame to reach higher in their own self and social knowledge, teasing our retinas with color palettes and patterns that prescribe meaning, and incites debate in our imaginations and the collective subconscious. Did you notice how the eyes of both Christian Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker are painted similarly, blackened by what looks like the love child of oil and charcoal, as if these two men, as dissimilar as they may appear, have seen the same things and perhaps see them the same way? This moral theme and argument prevail throughout the picture. What is right and what is wrong? My 18-year-old self sat in the cinema long after the credits rolled, gobsmacked by a beauty and complexity of humanity hitherto unwitnessed in cinema and dare I say in my own existence. They were the same. How was this possible? After all, one, Batman, is the “good guy” and the other, the Joker, the “bad guy.” What made them different is what they decided to do after seeing and reckoning with a Gotham that was just as morally challenging, ambiguous and fluid as the characters that populate its police force. All of the actors embody their characters with such ease and relatability. And the film asks what it is to be human, what it is to be alive and to participate fully in one’s own living. “The Dark Knight” etches so vividly the agnostic morality of survival and the discipline of goodness. Nolan’s second installment of the “Dark Knight” trilogy holds in its run time an impregnable truth: Life and people are beautifully complicated and evolving. It is this fact that has allowed “The Dark Knight” to stand up and stand out all these many years later. In my many rewatches, it continues to demonstrate for me the agility of the human spirit. It displays, with perhaps one of the greatest rivalries of all time to make its way to “celluloid” — that of Bale’s Batman and Ledger’s Joker — that each step of our lives is moving us towards being the hero or villain of our tale. And that the few things that can truly guide us are our empathy and hope for a greater tomorrow, with a dogged belief in the goodness of ourselves, others and our own personal Gotham. Follow the goodness. Believe in the goodness. "
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