Galley Slaves

My nerd-opus is up over at the other site. It's less movie review than deeply revealing confession. I'm just warning you.

In other news, the great Alexandra DuPont has a characteristically brilliant review. (She closes the review quoting a line from moi, which, I believe, completes my nerd trifecta, having now been linked at AICN, the force.net, and Whedonesque. This is not, perhaps, something I should brag about.) Anyway, sample brilliance:

When "Batman Begins" came out, many of us praised it as a crime drama that happened to feature a guy in a bat costume. But that praise was partially in comparison to the Schumacher nipple-disco that had come before.

Yes, in "Begins" Bruce Wayne fights gangsters and police corruption (and choppy action editing). But he was also dealing with ninjas and an ancient secret society and Liam Neeson with two names and a Van Dyke beard and the thespian skills of glassy-eyed Katie Holmes as a little girl trick-or-treating in an assistant-DA costume. Also, there was that CGI elevated train and the CGI hallucinations and the sonar-guided bats and that dopey conspiracy involving corporate malfeasance, poisoned water, and a gun that microwaved that water into steam (unless that water happened to reside in a human body). You could almost feel Nolan fighting for his gritty urban Batman against a riptide of studio notes.

"The Dark Knight" has none of that.

I haven't been holding out on you--I've got some thoughts about Dark Knight, but have been busy doing a larger piece on it which will run tomorrow. And apart from that, I've been grappling with how to talk about the movie without dipping too heavily into the realm of spoilers.

So I think I'll have some spoiler-filled thoughts tomorrow (appropriately noted, of course), but in the meantime, some general observations:

* I understand how annoying the hype surrounding this movie is. I realize how over-sold almost every movie event in recent years has been. (Godzilla, Cloverfield, Spider-Man, etc.)

All of that said, even if your expectations are very high, I think this is more movie than you're prepared for.

* Ditto the accolades for Heath Ledger's Joker. Look, Ledger's performance isn't legendary, but it is inventive, off-kilter, and very, very fine work. His voicework in particular, impresses because he hits odd cadences and registers. And his physicality, for me, is really great. The Joker is never supposed to be physically menacing--he's skinny and weak. But (and this is mentioned again and again in the comics) he's deceptively quick, particularly with his hands. Which makes him kind of unexpectedly scary at close range. Ledger and Nolan get this just right.

But most of all, the character is perfectly conceived. This isn't to take anything away from Ledger's work, mind you, but just to point out that it's build on really solid, thoughtful writing.

* I have no idea how much money this movie is going to make, but my unscientific guess is: a ton. I have no idea what the opening will be ($80M? $100M? $115M?), but I'll be really surprised if it doesn't have fantastic legs through July and August.

* It also would not surprise me if, at some point in the next couple weeks, the left decides that they have a political objection to Dark Knight. It isn't an overtly (or even covertly) political movie, but it does have something to say about the capacity of Western liberalism for dealing with a certain type of nihilist challenge, and the limits of liberalism's social compact.

I suspect that this is the real root of David Denby's infantile criticism of Dark Knight and other liberal critics may join in, particularly if they think that conservatives are embracing the movie as some sort of apologia for Bush/Cheney/neoconservatism/Iraq/Guantanamo/warmongering/suspension of habeas/etc.

David Edelstein's negative review complains that Christian Bale's smirk reminds him of "Dubya entitlement" and that Batman employs "FISA-like surveillance."

But I could well be wrong; maybe no one will attempt to invest any political meaning in it.

More tomorrow.

Update: One final point--even the title is perfect. I was wary of it, because I assumed Nolan was just using it as a sop to fanboys since there was no way he was going to use the Miller Dark Knight stuff. But I was wrong.

This isn't Miller's Dark Knight, but the title is absolutely integral to the film and not even in the obvious "dark night" of the soul sense.

Slate has an uncharacteristically boring piece about iPhone 2.0's web applications. And it misses the best web app there is: PhoneSaber.

Just trust me on this. Go get it. Now.

Galley Friend B.W. sends us this link to an essay about how the vastly overrated film critic Pauline Kael helped usher in the era of trash cinema:

It was only in the late stages of her New Yorker career (from which she retired in 1991) that some of her admirers began saying she had sold her point of view too effectively. A year after her death (in 2001) one formerly enthusiastic reader, Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of films such as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, wrote: "Cultural history has not been kind to Pauline."

Kael assumed she was safe to defend the choices of mass audiences because the old standards of taste would always be there. They were, after all, built into the culture. But those standards were swiftly eroding. Schrader argued that she and her admirers won the battle but lost the war. Acceptable taste became mass-audience taste, box-office receipts the ultimate measure of a film's worth, sometimes the only measure. Traditional, well-written movies without violence or special effects were pushed to the margins. "It was fun watching the applecart being upset," Schrader said, "but now where do we go for apples?"

Been wondering what's been going on in Steve Guttenberg's life? The New York Observer's Spencer Morgan profiles the star of Police Academy and finds out just why he moved back to New York:

About two years ago, Steve Guttenberg walked into the showbiz haunt Crustacean on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

"I walked in and the maitre d’ made a big deal for me," said Mr. Guttenberg. The Goot--as he’s known to his friends--appreciated the show. To hear him tell it, eating in public in Los Angeles is a dangerous business for an actor whose last box office hit was Three Men and a Baby in 1987.

"All of a sudden, the maitre d’ says, ‘Get out of the way!'" said Mr. Guttenberg. "And they literally threw me to the side and Tom Cruise came in. And he sat Tom Cruise and said, 'I’m so sorry, but you know, Tom Cruise.' And I’m like, 'Holy fuck.'"

The First Things blog points us to Joe Queenan, explaining why people hate contemporary music:

During a radio interview between acts at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, a famous singer recently said she could not understand why audiences were so reluctant to listen to new music, given that they were more than ready to attend sporting events whose outcome was uncertain. It was a daft analogy. Having spent most of the last century writing music few people were expected to understand, much less enjoy, the high priests of music were now portrayed as innocent victims of the public’s lack of imagination. If they don’t know in advance whether Nadal or Federer is going to win, but still love Wimbledon, why don’t they enjoy it when an enraged percussionist plays a series of brutal, fragmented chords on his electric marimba? What’s wrong with them?

The reason the sports analogy fails is because when Spain plays Germany, everyone knows that the game will be played with one ball, not eight; and that the final score will be 1-0 or 3-2 or even 8-1 - but definitely not 1,600,758 to Arf-Arf the Chalet Ate My Banana. The public may not know in advance what the score will be, but it at least understands the rules of the game.

Someone will have to remind me who wrote this, but some time ago a smart observer noted that contemporary music was the only one of the contemporary art forms not to be granted exalted status. But that's for a very simple reason: No one actually likes any contemporary art. However you can stroll past a Rothko and, after 30 seconds, proclaim its romantic brilliance. You can pretend to have read an unreadable modern novel. But contemporary music demands that you actually sit and suffer through two hours of aural hell. And that's a price too high for fashion, even for polite society.

Let's fire up the Congressional hearings. Ultimate fighting must be bad for your noggin. How else to explain Rampage Jackson's arrest today for hit-and-run?

Because, you see, Jackson drives an enormous monster truck with his picture and his name plastered all over it.

Where is the Budget MMA Fan when we need him!

Jody Bottum has a beautiful, heart-breaking obit for his friend:

I can picture it, unfortunately. Those ratty, rundown rooms in which he lived. The pistol he kept in gleeful defiance of the city's gun laws. The prickly brilliance with which he thought himself down into a narrower and narrower trap. The cosseted ill-health and the limp. The endless self-conceit that confirmed even his despair as a great and cosmic thing: an arrogance against the universe, a point of deadly pride. "Here in old age," he grandly announced when I saw him at lunch this spring, "I've finally decided that being a genius is enough for any man, and I'm just going to have to live with it."

He couldn't, of course, because it's not enough: The mad brightness of his arrogance burned against a background blacker than the grave. But the truth is that Tom Disch really was a genius. There was nothing he couldn't do with words.

Megan McArdle worries about whether or not she should get a Blu-Ray player--and calls herself an early adopter. I'm sorry, but if you didn't buy a player while the hi-def war was still being fought, then you're firmly in the mainstream. Us real early adopters have to have some bragging rights to make up for being on the bleeding edge.

For whatever it's worth, The Dark Knight tipped me--I'll be buying my Blu-Ray player the week before it comes out on disc.

Saw it this afternoon. I don't have anything coherent to say yet, except that it has not been over-promised. I was luke-warm on Batman Begins, even though I softened somewhat upon second viewing. But Dark Knight is in a totally different class. You can't consider it by the normal metrics of superhero movies. It aspire to, and achieves, the actual level of film. This is Chinatown and Heat rolled into one.

Much more later.

Update: I posted more thoughts here and a long essay, "The Dark Knight Triumphant," here.

Galley Friend Mike Russell puts together a strip where the comics version of Hellboy works with the movie version of Hellboy to explain the concept of Hellboy.

Genius.

Starbucks has released its first list of store closures. On the chopping block is the Starbucks on Rt. 38 in Cherry Hill, NJ. If they can close a Starbucks in Cherry Hill, then truly none of us is safe.

Dust bowl days indeed.