Promesso: a ottobre mi assumo come traduttrice e riempio tutti i buchi. Peccato che la paga non sia gran che, e che ancora una volta il capo sia psicopatico... | Two scattered words on "The Dark Knight" because it's on my mind too much. Saw it a few days ago and the global comment is "ok/meh", mostly for personal reasons. Problems: 0) Dead tired, brain didn't work. 1) "Batman Begins". I saw one half on the day before DK and the other on the same day (with Metallica in the middle). Considering I hate watching movies in two sessions because it confuses me and breaks the mood, I liked it. Christian Bale is very cute and talented but I feel no attraction for him; shallow, I know, but there it is. On the other hand, the supporting cast was mostly excellent. It lacked a really impressive bad guy but the "panic vs. fear" theme interested me, of course. Fight panic, use the fear. 2) The Joker. An unforgettable character. The personification of absolute chaos and nihilism. The performance of a lifetime... sadly. I looked at the Joker and couldn't help seeing Heath Ledger. Who had always been like Christian Bale for me in term of attractiveness, but his death shocked me all the same. So, this turned the movie into meta-cinema, that is something that goes beyond cinema and involves real life. This was very interesting, but it detracted from my appreciation of the movie as itself. (I have a long rant about a certain schizoid way of looking at antidepressants as either a useless luxury or the devil itself, instead of medicines like any other, but it will have to wait. I'll just say this: nobody can know what went through Heath's mind. NOBODY.) 3) Rachel. She didn't move me, thus her death had no particular effect on me beyond "wow, they actually did it" and (days later) "that's sexist". Also, I kept thinking that being with Tom Cruise had really changed her, not realizing until the end credits that it wasn't Katie Holmes but the talented and miscast-as-damsel-in-distress Maggie Gyllenhaal. As I said, I WAS tired. Anyway this prevented me from relating to her as I had done in "Batman Begins". 4) Plot and philosophy. Both muddled. A bit like "The Prestige" (Christopher Nolan again), the movie dazzled me but left me with a lot of questions, and not constructive questions, but the kind that left a bunch of us discussing all evening over hamburgers: why did Batman save Dent and not Rachel? (because the Joker switched addresses) and how many people did Two Face kill? (no idea, but his makeup was fantastic). Also, there were moments when I was mentally screaming for it to end, all the times when they got involved for ages on economics and mafia affairs and I'm Batman no I am I don't want to be I have to be but who are you do we need Batman no we don't you're responsible no you are when you are the man you were and the mask or the face and... yes, that was in "Batman Begins", but that's when I started getting confused on this very important point. The stuff I listed, apart from economics and mafia, should exactly have made the movie interesting and discussion-worthy, but I just found it confused, which was my problem with "The Prestige" too. I don't get Bruce's doubts and the juxtaposition with the clean-cut Harvey Dent (who must have had some skeletons in the cupboard if they called him Two-Face even before - or was it because of the coin?). I mean, the OTHER Bruce, HE is a conflicted hero who has the tiny problem of turning into a destructive green monster now and then. And Spider-Man did the "hero unjustly criticized by media who goes crazy when he's dressed in black" routine already. Maybe it's because I know nothing of DC Comics and Batman himself, but I see nothing ambiguous in Bruce Wayne. His private life is boring. (Thank goodness for Alfred.) Little children are not scared of him. He tries not to kill, so in my book his morals are pretty ok. However. He strikes fear in the heart of the bad guys just by being black and mysterious. The last words of the movie, spoken by Gordon (damn, Gary, you gave me such a scare!), seem to imply that he is "the Dark Knight" just because he acts in the shadows, not because he is dark inside. If this is the only reason the media fear him, it dangerously borders Super-Human Registration Act territory. And you know I hated how THAT was handled in Marvel's "Civil War". The moral lesson of the movie has nothing to do with Batman; actually the Joker gives it with the two boats' "social experiment". His experiment shows that human beings can be chaotic and anarchic AND good, even though it's just chance. The people in those boats really "did not need Batman" because they did not know he was there, they had no idea he was in the wings preventing the Joker from killing them after they had saved themselves. Gotham is not corrupt, as Ra's-al-Ghul-however-you-spell-it believed, but neither is Batman. Strangely, this makes the Joker right about at least one thing: |