Scar & Catwoman, or How I'm Seeing Double

Kitties do love their birds...

The Dark Knight (IMAX), or How bigger IS better!

The Dark Knight

Dir. Christopher Nolan

Written by: Chris & Jonathan Nolan (Story by C. Nolan and David Goyer)

Starring: Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine and the late Heath Ledger.

With all those shattered box office records and a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, is there anything left to say about Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight? Probably not, but here I go offering my two cents regardless [spoiler-free!]

On Heath Ledger: Sometimes - not always - a performance not only lives up to the hype, but it supersedes it. I had been a fan of Ledger's work ever since he sung and danced his way into Julia Stiles' heart way back when, and his Ennis Del Mar is soul-crushing, but who knew he had that psycopathic, anarchic force of nature that is The Joker inside him? A treat to watch whenever he's on screen, Ledger transforms an age-old character from campy yet scary to fucking scary yet macabre-y funny. I don't know about an Oscar, cause really his performance will outlast any gold-coated naked man.

On Christian Bale: It must be hard to be hearing all about your co-star when your performance is the anchor of the film. But I'm sure Christian is a good sport and must understand why his performance (and his character) are sort of pushed to the background in this sequel: isn't that what the movie is all about: having Batman recede into the darkest corners of Gotham City? Still, his Batman is still scary (especially when he's dangling people in rooftops) and his Bruce Wayne is still a jerk to perfection.

On the rest of the cast: Can we just talk about how no other summer movie (or any movie in general this year so far) has offered a better ensemble cast? Sure, Ledger does offer the meatiest role/performance and Bale shows us that he has the chops to carry the cape, but how about Eckhart's White Knight turned revenge-seeking Two Face? Or Oldman's troubled Lieutenant Gordon? Or Gyllenhaal's lovely and spunky Dawes? And trust Freeman and Caine to offer small yet textured roles (Supporting Actor Oscars don't come along for no reason y'know?) 

On the IMAX experience: Uh... it's Batman, just bigger! and better! How can an IMAX-sized Christian not be a good enough draw? True, the skylines and the sequences shot in IMAX are amazing and breathtaking (I really felt like I was falling into Hong Kong! and how cool was the Bat-pod scene?!) but seeing a giant sized Christian did it for me.

On the movie overall: I'll leave it up to fanboys and other 'net crazies to ponder over whether The Dark Knight is a right wing terrorist basher, an exploration on anarchy and bureaucracy, on the pathos of heroism or the self-effacing power of evil for evil's sake. For me it was an intense crime drama that had more to do with (dare I say it?) past Oscar Winners The Departed and No Country for Old Men than with Spidey and Iron Man. The canvas is so vast, the storylines so intricate, the characters so lived-in that the fact that Bruce dresses up as a Bat seemed like just an added bonus to this clever nuanced vision of a world that seethes with evil and the few that make do and still try and do good. 

"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" says Harvey Dent - sadly in Gotham (an allegory of the world?) people are more interested in living longer than in being heroes... A+

Iron Man vs Batman, or How it's funny cause it's true...

Check it out, it's all kinds of hilarious:



Thanks to incontention.com for the link.

Dark Knight, or How the Bat has evolved

And because the image is not quite as ubiquitous as the Warner Bros marketing team wanted it to be... yet:

Arkham Asylum A Serious House on Serious Earth, or How I Bought/Read My First Pretentious Graphic Novel

So, still reeling from the fact that I went to New York's biggest comic book store and bought one of the best-selling graphic novel's of all time there I thought I should actually get around to read it. Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum, A Serious House on Serious Earth illustrated by Dave McKean is an interesting read for many reasons. It is Batman as I had never thought of him before (sexually stunted? ambiguous and shadowy? broken and fragmented?) - it's not West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney or even Bale and I don't think I'd have it any other way. Little did I know that this classic graphic novel has spurred disparate reception with the lovely power of hindsight. Just from reading around the web the word that is ever-present in all the negative reviews is "pretentious" and maybe that's why I liked it so much.
Freud + Christian Imagery on its head + Tarot Symbology + Jungian Mythology + Batman + Theories of Sanity/Insanity = A good read for someone as geeky and theory-oriented as myself. The inclusion of Morrison's original script in this version was very intriguing - you get to see how intricately woven all the symbology was in Morrison's writing and yet how far away McKean drifts from specificity and moves towards mood and tone to invoke the surrealism and Saturnalia-effect the book has when you first read it. This is the kind of graphic novel that just screams "Theorise-Me!" (an apt Lewis Carrollian imperative from a book so influenced by that 'children's story') and well I would love to - I find that stories about losing one's sanity in order to gain self-knowledge are quite appealing. Reading Asylum reminded me of Carlos Fuentes Aura and Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo - which, while different in style and scope deal with similar topics - only instead of Batman you're getting Latin-American history.