“Some People Call Me The Space Cowboy …”

Last week I posted a review of the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, in which I said I liked the movie a lot, not least for its use of a comic-book hero to posit some very interesting philosophical questions vis-à-vis the nature of crime and justice. Was Adrian McKinty convinced? Nope. Herewith be his thoughts on why the success of The Dark Knight augers ill for the future of mainstream cinema, to wit:

For all its visual brilliance, special effects and story telling zest, The Dark Knight was like eating an entire box of Cocoa Pops on a Saturday morning. Enjoyable at the time, but later I wondered how I was so easily seduced.
  It’s tough to go up against a movie that has a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Every critic in the world seems to have loved The Dark Knight. A few complained it was too long, but that was about it.
  Its length didn’t bother me, but I did start to get bored with the Joker’s constant ability to outwit everyone in Gotham City, and maybe at some point it would have been nice to see someone get clobbered in the face and see it actually, you know, hurt.
Anyway, Batman has made 300 million dollars in the US alone and will probably gross a billion by the time it’s done. Hollywood will make more make films like Batman because that’s clearly what you people out there want.
  By going to Batman and Wanted and Ironman in droves and staying away from a thriller like Tell No One, your message is loud and clear: don’t worry about giving us a logical plot or realistic situations just make it stylish, loud and fast and we’ll go.
  It’s interesting that as thriller novels get more and more complex, thrillers in the cinema seem to get less so. If you want to pick up a clever thriller in paperback these days it’s very easy. Patrick Anderson, mystery critic of the Washington Post has written a book called THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER examining this trend, and even smart mainstream novelists like Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy and John Banville have jumped into the thriller/mystery genre.
  Funnily enough, in the 1970s the situation was exactly the opposite of today. Intelligent thrillers were nowhere to be found. Airport novels dominated the genre and the really interesting stuff was happening at the movies. Remember when a film like Coppola’s The Conversation could actually get an audience? Movie thrillers back then were funny, clever and tightly plotted. Could today’s studios give us The French Connection or The Taking of Pelham 123 or The Parallax View or even All The President’s Men?
  I’m sceptical. I think the trend will be to make superheroes increasingly conflicted, not to give ordinary people interesting situations and problems. Hollywood follows the money. For every Departed that makes a profit there’s an American Gangster that underperformed. Why should producers take the risk? The failure of every single Iraq movie and the success of almost every comic book movie is not a good sign for those of us who like a bit of politics in their films, for our heroes to hurt when they get hit, and for them to use their heads to solve problems instead of their fists.

  Hmmmm. Meanwhile, over at Confessions of a Film Critic, John Maguire has this to say:

This is a haunted tragedy that recasts the ancient myths of the hero in an ultramodern nihilism, achieving a complexity of feeling that is difficult to achieve in any kind of art, let alone the multi-million dollar studio summer movie.

  The Big, Big Question: who to be more afraid of disagreeing with, McKinty or Maguire? They’re both very scary men …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: The Dark Knight

It’s always darkest before the dawn, and even though The Dark Knight offers a few slivers of hope by the end, this is a very bleak movie indeed. In a nutshell, Bruce Wayne / Batman (Christian Bale) is fighting to rid Gotham City of the Mob by targeting money launderers, and is so successful that The Joker (Heath Ledger) takes it upon himself to kill the Caped Crusader. Behind the cartoonish superhero posturing, however, is a very serious meditation on America’s approach to the so-called ‘War on Terror’ – Batman engages in the ‘extraordinary rendition’ of a suspect from Hong Kong, and isn’t averse to torturing a prisoner when the occasion demands. There’s also a fascinating double-act between Batman and Gotham’s new District Attorney, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), aka ‘the White Knight’, who distrusts Batman’s vigilante approach and wants to fight crime in a clear and transparent fashion. The director, Christopher Nolan, has crafted a thoughtful and often philosophical movie, but he hasn’t neglected to include a number of powerful action sequences, most of which – the lumbering and unconvincing Bat-bike apart – are expertly executed via Steadicam. Bale’s bass growl when voicing Batman is still an unnecessary irritation, but The Dark Knight is much more concerned with exploring the psychology behind Bruce Wayne than his alter ego, and here Bale is in superb form. Surrounded by an excellent cast – Morgan Freeman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Gary Oldman and Michael Caine all shine, particularly Caine – he is magnificently intense and introspective, offering an unusually realistic portrayal of a superhero beset by self-doubt. The star of the piece, however, is Heath Ledger as The Joker. Combining the expected range of tics and quirks of the clownish psychotic with a pathos-laden performance that offers real depth to the character, Ledger burns where Bale smoulders, leaving a scorching reminder of what his talent might have achieved. – Declan Burke

This review was first published in TV Now magazine

A GONZO NOIR: An Internet Novel # 12

A Grand Vizier writes: “Pootled along to see the new Batman flick The Dark Knight yesterday morning, and terrific stuff it is too, an unusually bleak and philosophical movie for mainstream viewing, especially given the cartoonish quality of most superhero movies. It’s chock-a-block with story, so it’s probably not too much of a spoiler to tell you that, among his many outrageous acts (the ‘disappearing pencil’ gag is hilarious), The Joker gets to blow up a hospital. Which is quite the bummer, as A GONZO NOIR is rapidly approaching its conclusion (the penultimate section comes below) with hospital porter Billy / Karlsson poised to – oh yes! – blow up his place of work. Oh well, it can’t be Mills & Boon every day, right? Anyhoo, on with the show …

The story so far: Failed author Declan Burke (right), embittered but still passably handsome, wakes up one morning to find a stranger in his back garden. The stranger introduces himself as Karlsson, a hospital porter who assists old people who want to die and the hero of a first draft of a novel Burke wrote some five years previously. Now calling himself Billy, he suggests a redraft of the story that includes blowing up the hospital where he works. Intrigued, Burke agrees to a collaboration, but things do not go swimmingly …
  For the reasons we’re publishing a novel to the interweb, go here.
  If you want to skip all that malarkey, the novel starts here.
  If you’re one of the 34,014 readers who have been following the story, the latest update can be found here.
  Oh, and as a special treat for Ms Witch, this is the view Billy / Karlsson has from the decking where he and the Grand Viz have their little ‘hospital incineration’ chats …

  Now read on …