The Dark Knight

The thing about Christopher Nolan’s Batman is that it doesn’t resort to cheap gimmicks and the obligatory cuteness factor general audiences relish with glee (see: Tobey Maguire doing his Saturday Night Fever impression in Spiderman 3) with the intent to make the character more palatable to the masses. Compared to the, say, more popular Iron Man movie a few months back, The Dark Knight is uncompromising in its tone as its main protagonist is in his own moral stance against overwhelming forces that aims to subjugate him to their will. 

As artistic and visionary as it is for its genre, it won’t become too popular. Make no mistake: it is the masterpiece critics say it to be. With complex characters and excellent story and performances (I take back my initial dislike on Heath Ledger’s casting---the guy is THE JOKER), the movie is tailor-made for reference books that filmmaking students a hundred years from now will be studying. And the film was often compared to excellent crime epics like Michael Mann’s HEAT and the crime epic to end all crime epics: Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather 2. Great films, but only to the people who actually watch movies and not the average person looking for an eye candy to kill the time or take his date on a make-out session. 

Not that it’s the average moviegoer’s fault for disliking it. Nor am I insinuating that I’m somewhat better because I see things the snotty critics and the geek-boy comic book aficionados have. I perfectly understand the sentiment of the person I overheard going out the theater blurting out : “BORING.” Or the countless ‘film aficionados’ who dismissed it as too self-indulgent, whatever that means. They were looking for that formulaic BANG and never got it. Anyway I’m not going to expound more on this at the risk of sounding too much like the ‘aficionados’ who amuse me to high heavens. Go watch it, anyway. You’ll probably like it.

Or not.

The films of Christopher Nolan

One more week.


further viewing:


Memento
Insomnia
Batman Begins
The Prestige

Pink ribbon scars, that never forget

Summer 1993, in dreams…

It's always around April, mid-afternoon, somewhere around 4 or 5. The time of the day when everything's in golden hues and the landscape is colored brown filled with occasional patches of green and the royal blue sky is clear and slowly giving in to dusk’s red light. The streets are filled with young mothers, nannies and little kids, engaged in their own animated games and conversations. Among them is your sister who just started her academic life as a kindergarten student, playing with her friends Mandie and Honey. 


You’re inside the house listening all day to the radio. Enjoying alternative tunes and feeling like a real sophisticated adult for appreciating something that’s supposed to be an ‘alternative’ to the ‘stupid’ posturing of pop, not knowing it’s the same movement perpetuated by the very same entities who gave you the pop music you abhor with passion. 


You wander outside and go west towards the direction of the huge water tank, and the breeze is cool and dusty and smells of dried grass, hay, an unknown but familiar sweet-smelling blossom, and the slightest hint of dried cow dung. 


Walking past the Ematas and the Eusebios, you find yourself at the end of the cement road in the middle of a large field that used to have been rice paddies up until the late 80s but are now just barren soil used to grow assorted crops like squash, watermelons and a wide variety of weeds. 


You take a deep breath as you stare at the setting sun just beyond the huge tank looming in the opposite side. 


A sense of tranquility flows over you and a feeling of relief that you survived the first year of high school with just a few bumps and bruises. You go over your game plan for the next school year to show everyone how serious you really are with studying. And you're filled with intense pride at the thought of what you can accomplish in the coming years while in school. 


Until your little sister suddenly yells from afar to break you out of an almost drunken stupor; ordered no doubt by your mother to have you summoned for a little housework. You sigh and use your walking stick to poke a paleolithic-looking creature resting in the crevice of a large cement drainage. It won't budge. 


You glance at the receding rays of the sun one last time and head home.