When it comes to the movies, is there such a thing as too big? With the inflation of expectations and ticket prices, audiences are demanding more from their movies than ever before. We want spectacle and quality; we want to be dazzled by the fantastic and touched with real emotion; we want movies to make us think while we shut our brains off for the ride.
The major studios are more than happy to pursue these paradoxical audience expectations, behaving like Microsoft coding a new OS when it comes to their tentpole releases. Ambition and bravado trump practicality, utility, or audience need. More graphics, more wisecracks, and more simulated emotions get shoved into screenplays until they collapse under the countless cross-purposes. Simply put, studios are reactive beasts, eagerly chasing after every audience’s critical whim in a desperate bid to please.
Meanwhile audiences are exceedingly quick to register their displeasure. Movies are too soulless, too unfaithful to the source material, too stupid, too grim, too vapid, too noisy, and not action-packed enough. If a summer movie doesn’t burn a metropolis to the ground while the hero cracks wise with an improbably hot love interest, we feel cheated. Yet, when movies do exactly that (such as the excoriated Hancock), we deride them for being pandering and implausible.
In short, the studios can’t win. We expect too much; far more than a fiscally responsible studio can deliver with a $180 million dollar investment.
Despite the impossibility of their very existence, these major studio tentpoles are cinema’s greatest windmills. The mad quest to serve every audience’s quixotic expectations is the Everest of filmmaking. To deliver one monstrously successful picture is the dream of writers and directors everywhere – the cinematic equivalent of throwing a no-hitter in the World Series or throwing a winning touchdown pass as time expires in the Super Bowl.
That sense of glory is what drives filmmakers to attempt the impossible. Once in a career they’ll succeed, and when they do, the result is thrilling. Writer and director Christopher Nolan faced those long odds with his Batman sequel The Dark Knight, and for what will be the only time in his career, he soundly beat them.
That’s not saying that The Dark Knight is a great film, or even a good one. It’s too frantic and jittery; in order to fit all the pieces together, everything is hurried. The timing of the release, however, is downright perfect, and in raw business terms, that’s all that matters.
The Dark Knight is one part theme park ride and one part meditation on terrorism. Nolan builds a rollercoaster ride that careens through the various facets of moral darkness. This is what the major releases are now, we buckle in and strap ourselves down while the ride sharply veers this way and that at an ever accelerating pace. The film flirts with the exploring the roots of evil, but will never be accused of having any real insight into the black. The whole story has a few very nifty turns, but they roar past with such velocity that you’re tempted to look behind you and figure out what you just missed.
In this outing, Christian Bale returns as Bruce Wayne, the gaddish playboy with the crime fighting alter-ego. His crime-fighting has inspired fear in the bad guys, and copycat (copybat?) low-tech citizens to take back the streets. As
It takes a second viewing to really wrap your head around the plot nuances. There’s mobsters laundering money, some kind of bank heist, and a lot of dynamite. The story is too compressed in the first hour, and the subplot involving Chin Han’s renegade Chinese money laundering could have been excised without losing anything critical. The real attraction here isn’t Batman, Bruce Wayne, or a mute Chinese national, it’s the late Heath Ledger’s sensuous performance as The Joker.
His performance is the match that lights The Dark Knight’s fuse, and he isn’t in the film nearly enough. The Joker is the most complete creation that movies have seen in years, all hitching lisp and an awkward shuffle. His awkward, menacing, knife-to-the-mouth ambush of Maggie Gyllenhall’s character is one of the most squirm inducing moments in cinema this year; Ledger’s performance is all consuming. It’s a shame that the film is in too much of a hurry to linger with Ledger a little while longer.
In the haste to cram everything in, the moments of reflection, of real meaning, are lost in the turbulence. I could do without the pedestrian shoot-out in
When the Joker threatens to destroy a hospital unless a civilian is murdered, and as the city turns to savagery, we only see it blurring by like scenery on the highway. The darkness makes for pretty scenery, but the underlying message is as innocuous as a chain of billboards.
In this case, though, Nolan gets a pass. He is directing a phenomenon, not a thesis. He managed to distill mass audience tastes into a singular and personal vision, and the odds that he will ever scale the same heights are roughly equivalent to David Wells pitching another no-hit game.
Ledger’s performance, though, is the stuff of movie legends, and will be around long after the next incarnations of Batman come and go. Of all the major comic book heros, only Batman has a mythic depth. Equal parts Hamlet and The Count Of Monte Cristo, the Batman mythology eagerly lends itself to reinvention; the primal elements of the story are easy enough to map onto the fears and yearnings of any given era. This generation apparently wants it all – action, romance, explosions, and depth – all in :30 YouTube friendly clips.
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