Now Playing: The Fall
First up, Miles (see comments below previous post) got a copy of The Big Issue Cymru last week and according to that one, my story will be running in this week's issue, not the previous one as I reported below. Apologies for any inconvenience...
In other news, I caught up with The Dark Knight while back in the Netherlands, and for the most part enjoyed it rather a lot. As has been noted elsewhere, it's very much Heath Ledger's film, and I don't think there's ever been a better Joker. Nicholson's version is still pretty damned iconic ("Wait 'til they get a load of me!") but Ledger's take on the character wins in terms of sheer, oozing menace: a truly evil and psychotic villain, up there with Kurtwood Smith's superbly deranged Clarence Boddicker from the first Robocop film. You certainly wouldn't want to be in the same room as any of them.
What I didn't like so much - and this is seems to be the case with all the big superhero films of recent years - was the excessively convoluted plot, in no way helped by the apparent need to stuff another villain into the story. Two-face (another Fall song, pop pickers - and there's also Riddler, while we're at it) would surely have merited a film in his own right. And he didn't really get to be Two-Face for long enough, in my view. Perhaps he's not dead after all.
I also didn't like the nonsensical subplot about cellphones and sonar, and I couldn't for the life of me work out what Batman was doing in that forensic reconstruction scene with the Joker's bullet. The fact that Bale delivered all his Batman lines in a gutteral croak didn't exactly assist matters.
But I liked Ledger, I liked the Batpod motorcycle (although I bet Judge Dredd is fuming); I liked the action set pieces (not too much obvious CGI, for once) and it was fun to relate to Chicago in a way I hadn't been able to do before my recent trip. I much preferred this film to Spiderman, Hulk, Superman etc.
Onward to Hellboy II.
