Author Topic: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!  (Read 175209 times)

Offline Ellemeno

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #70 on: July 20, 2008, 02:01:57 pm »
I had somehow missed that Rachel died in the film.  I had to have that explained to me at lunch afterward by Lynne and LauraGigs.  Seems like a movie can pretty much bring anyone back in a sequel, or for that matter in the same film (Commissioner Gordon). 

As Rob Lowe as a movie executive says to Aaron Eckhart in "Thank You for Smoking" you can explain anything in a movie with a line something like, "Thank goodness we invented the XYZ technology."  :)

Offline tamarack

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #71 on: July 20, 2008, 09:02:33 pm »

As Rob Lowe as a movie executive says to Aaron Eckhart in "Thank You for Smoking" you can explain anything in a movie with a line something like, "Thank goodness we invented the XYZ technology."  :)

True, very true. And so funny when it was said in that movie!

So if Batman was the only thing that kept the Joker from falling he either had to tie him off and let him hang until he figured out a way to "unhang" himself, or Batman had to help him get out of the situation. Funny that we have no explanation for that. The scene just stopped.
 

Offline KristinDaBomb

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #72 on: July 20, 2008, 10:48:32 pm »
I saw it today and it was amazing! Heath really outdid himself.
xoxo

~Kristin~

<3

Offline Fran

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #73 on: July 20, 2008, 11:28:45 pm »
I had somehow missed that Rachel died in the film.  I had to have that explained to me at lunch afterward by Lynne and LauraGigs. 

I missed the part about the addresses being deliberately mixed up by the Joker and wondered why Batman showed up where Harvey Dent was.  LOL

I really liked "The Dark Knight" and loved Heath's Joker.  While it's always nice to see Heath, I felt the Joker had enough screen time.

Offline Ellemeno

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #74 on: July 21, 2008, 12:28:12 am »
I missed the part about the addresses being deliberately mixed up by the Joker and wondered why Batman showed up where Harvey Dent was.  LOL



Me too, exactly, Fran.  :)

Offline ifyoucantfixit

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #75 on: July 21, 2008, 02:13:39 am »
     I agree with Barb completely.  This movie was the best superhero movie ever, because it was very fraught with truth and reality.  It had the sensate madman.  He was extremely intelligent, and needed an equally intellectual foe to go against.  Batman was that foe.  The Joker used the fact that he was willing to do anything, kill anyone wreck any place in order to prove his point.  Batman being the opposite end of that rule.  Has his set of rules that he must operate within.  The Joker knows those rules, and did all in his ability to try and get Batman to violate those rules.  It was the true good vs evil at its basic level...As to the violence and scaryness of the movie,, that is so  what those kinds of movies show.

    They are not meant to be simply an intellectual thesis on what may or may not happen when a bad guy is set on the  world.  That is a textbook that does that.  This was after
all a movie.  It was an action movie, and it did that in spades in my opinion.  It is the best one i have ever seen.  I dont ordinarily go to see these kinds of movies, but because Heath was in it..I Went...  I didnt set about to criticize it for what its supposed to be.  That is what i expected going in.  I dont love this genre at all.  But if i did love them.. this is one that I would have been waiting to see. 
 
    Heath was at once scary, and pitiful, and also funny.  How difficult is that to be.?  Make people hate and fear you,, and at the same time feel sorrow for you as well.  He was spectacular.  Plus opposed to what others have said,, I thought he got a great deal of screen time during the two and a half hour film.
   
    The rest of the cast in my opinion was very good and also believable.  The least favorite of mine was Maggie Gyllenhaal, and I was so prepared to love her,, she has such a great presence, but her part didnt leave her a great deal to be, other than just decoration.  Where or not you think she is that lovely is another thing entirely.

    The rest of the cast were great except for the guy and I dont .. know his name.. He played the Mayor...He has on so much eye makeup it looked like he was trying to
compete with the Joker, and I fully expected him to turn into a villian ,  but he did not. 




     Beautiful mind

Offline Ellemeno

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #76 on: July 21, 2008, 01:42:02 pm »
 
    The rest of the cast were great except for the guy and I dont .. know his name.. He played the Mayor...He has on so much eye makeup it looked like he was trying to
compete with the Joker, and I fully expected him to turn into a villian ,  but he did not. 



I totally agreed with what you wrote here, so I went to go look up his name - Nestor Carbonell - and found this on his IMDb forum.

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0004801/board/nest/74492702

Some are saying it's just his eyelashes.  But he did seem like an odd fit for the mayor.

Offline Fran

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #77 on: July 21, 2008, 03:12:44 pm »

I totally agreed with what you wrote here, so I went to go look up his name - Nestor Carbonell - and found this on his IMDb forum.

http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0004801/board/nest/74492702

Some are saying it's just his eyelashes.  But he did seem like an odd fit for the mayor.

My thoughts exactly.

Offline Mikaela

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #78 on: July 21, 2008, 03:37:29 pm »
I've taken anti-depressants for six years.  I don't lick my lips much at all.


About the Joker's tongue thing.... Every time that comes up, or I see one of those clips, I can't help thinking about Jake Gyllenhaal and his habit of showing a little tongue, very adorably and interestingly  :P so - I mean, it's been analysed enough on Brokeback boards! So I've been thinking to myself that maybe (Yes, I know it's a far shot) Heath took some very noticable trait like that, which can seem so *hot* and enticing and well, - cute, - and turned it upside down on purpose for the Joker, into soemthing entirely else. Not as a parody of someone else, by no means, simply as another way of making something potentionally nice seem creepy and unexpected and over the top -  and nevertheless pretty mesmerizing.


Not that I'm really here, you know. Since I'm avoiding spoilers and all.  ::)

Offline Meryl

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Re: The Dark Knight: News, Reviews, your Views. "SPOILERS" welcome!
« Reply #79 on: July 22, 2008, 02:10:05 am »
I saw it this afternoon, unfortunately not with John Gallagher, since he had a speech class.   I'd love to have had a fellow Brokie with me. :(

I found that the violence didn't bother me much, because I never got into the story enough to forget it was just a movie.  I winced at the more creative stuff, like the pencil moment, but it seemed like a logical thing for the Joker to do in order to establish his cruel persona.  Frankly, when he first appeared, I could see why the other crooks didn't take him seriously.  He seemed nebbishy and even whiny, and he had this clown outfit on. 

Heath was a delightfully creepy and enthusiastic villain, but I couldn't believe the Joker had the chops to get all the stuff organized that he had to do throughout the movie: plan and execute a big bank heist, wire an entire hospital to explode, wire two huge ferries to do the same, as well as a number of crooks and Dent and Rachel, send out any number of teams of hoods to corrupt cops, kidnap people, and assassinate a judge and police commissioner, crash a party in a protected penthouse, arrange gangster summit talks, cadge a nurse outfit and give Dent a therapy session, ambush a police caravan in an endless tunnel with an arsenal of weapons and accomplices at hand and then get caught on purpose, prepare a trap for a helicopter so it crashes onto a city street, set a fire truck ablaze, call in to a TV show, make announcements to the populace---have I missed anything?  And all in the space of what seemed to be about 3 days, thanks to the relentless pacing.

I gave up trying to follow the story pretty quickly.  Muddy doesn't begin to describe it.  I had to take the characters' word for it that Harvey Dent was a big hero, because Aaron Eckhart wasn't given much help by the script or the director to establish the difficulty and challenges of what his job entailed.  He seemed rather cocky and flip a lot of the time.  Gary Oldman at least had a sense of gravitas and you knew he felt the burden of the job he was driven to do.  Maggie Gyllenhaal tried to give Rachel some sort of intelligent presence, but ultimately she was only there as a pawn.  The whole love triangle thing didn't work for me, since Dent and Rachel, though already a couple at the beginning, had no chemistry, and the brief scene with Rachel and Bruce was dead in the water.  I agree with the others that the choice of the actor who played the Mayor was mystifying.  I guess I have to remember that it's a movie based on a comic book, and depth of characterization is not a big priority.

I enjoyed the thumping rhythm of the score, especially in IMAX, since you feel it physically, and there was plenty of it.  But it covered up a lot of the dialogue, especially at the end when the platitudes were coming thick and fast.  I caught some sort of stuff about Batman having to be hunted because he wasn't a hero, but he was a protector or something.  Whatever.  ::)

It's a good thing Christian Bale is hot, because he wasn't able to give much more to Batman than a glowering intensity and some sort of Darth Vadery delivery.  As Bruce Wayne, he was okay, but if you compare him to, say, Daniel Craig in the Bond movies, you realize that his inner life was not communicated very well.  The shots of him brooding on top of buildings and soaring among them were absolutely gorgeous, though.  Michael Caine (who had the best lines in the film along with Heath) and Morgan Freeman didn't disappoint, but their roles were hardly a stretch.  Did anyone else see Cillian Murphy's (The Scarecrow) cameo at the beginning?  I only just realized the guy with bag on his head must have been him.

I'm sure if I go back to see the movie again that it will make more sense, but really I don't think that's the point.  I'm not the target audience by a longshot, and that audience seems just fine with it.  I'm really glad I saw it, because Heath was just the greatest, and I kept wanting to hug him, streaked makeup, greasy hair and all.  I loved when, after the semi flipped over (wow!) and Batman was on the ground, he just jumped on him and did this crazy whoo-hooing flipout thing.  And as the nurse trying for that last pesky button on the phone that made everything blow up, then walking off like some dotty drag queen, he was just hilarious.  Another brilliant moment was when he realized that the people on the ferries had opted not to blow each other up; he had this dawning sense of somehow having misjudged them, and was kind of awed and saddened by it.  I was sorry that they left him hanging at the end; I felt he deserved to be seen one last time, whiling away the time in solitary or something, planning his next quirky, marvelous move.  :-*

Ich bin ein Brokie...