Posts Tagged ‘Frank Miller’
Sunday Links
* Why they occupy: University of California edition.
* The recession comes home to Morris County.
Morris County has experienced a sharp increase in motor vehicle burglaries throughout 2011, according to Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi, who said the increase can be attributed to independent trends that have emerged in small geographic areas in the county at different times and committed by different individuals.
* MetaFilter has your Neil deGrasse Tyson Overdrive.
* Get me Val Kilmer: Christian Bale says he’s done playing Batman.
“I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”
* Also on the Occupy beat: “Pre-Occupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street.” And also at the New Yorker: Was anti-Keystone activism the real political movement of 2011?
* Something Is Happening: Notes on the First Two Months of Occupy.
* Mary Roach: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Orgasm.
* Aaron Bady: “When everything that can be recorded is recorded, our means of protecting privacy must fundamentally change.”
* Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison. But the prototype looks so friendly!
Three for Sunday: Superman, Seinfeld, The Dark Knight Returns
Three for Sunday.
* Superbugs: all about the new generation of treatment-resistant infections.
“My basic premise,” Wetherbee said, “is that you take a capable microörganism like Klebsiella and you put it through the gruelling test of being exposed to a broad spectrum of antibiotics and it will eventually defeat your efforts, as this one did.” Although Tisch Hospital has not had another outbreak, the bacteria appeared soon after at several hospitals in Brooklyn and one in Queens. When I spoke to infectious-disease experts this spring, I was told that the resistant Klebsiella had also appeared at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, in Manhattan, and in hospitals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, and St. Louis.
*Will the next Christopher Nolan movie be a straight-up adaptation of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns?
By leaving the Joker (literally) hanging at the end of The Dark Knight, Nolan left open-ended a story that begs to be finished. Even Tim Burton knew he had to kill Jack Nicholson at the “end”. Nolan himself killed Ra’s at the end of Batman Begins and he even tied-up a loose end regarding the Scarecrow in The Dark Knight. These are both clear signals Nolan knows the story has to have an end and has some idea for that end already in mind.
Nolan further foreshadows the future in The Dark Knight’s climatic moments as well. Remember when the Joker tells Batman the two of them can “do this for years”? Filmmakers of Nolan’s talent don’t throw away lines like that, especially in a moment like that. That was the director signaling to the audience that he understands one of “The Dark Knight Returns'” main themes – that the Joker’s very existence is primarily to be Batman’s nemesis and their fates were inevitably intertwined, as well as a signal that their final showdown will in fact come years down the road.
Which brings us back to the three-act structure: Act One (Batman Begins) was the first Batman story. Act Two (The Dark Knight) was a classic tragic turning point.
So what does this demand Act Three be?
Well, not only the final battle of Batman and the Joker, but also the last Batman story, of course.
More discussion of the idea, which I can personally guarantee will never, ever happen, at io9.
* A not-quite-complete list of Kramer’s business ideas. Not quite complete, because Wikipedia has even more.
The Dark Knight
If The Dark Knight is the greatest superhero movie of all time—and I think it probably is—it is entirely on the back of Heath Ledger’s immaculate turn as the Joker. Ledger is utterly, utterly, utterly perfect in this role—so perfect in fact that it is impossible to imagine either anyone else ever playing the Joker or any other villain stepping in to carry a sequel.
(Who’s even still on the bench at this point? The Penguin? Riddler? King Tut? Catwoman can’t carry a movie all by herself. The best bet, it seems to me, would be to go forward with the long-teased Batman vs. Superman project; it’d be something of a genre mismatch for the Christian Bale franchise, but at least it’d spare us all another round of movie nonsense with the highly overrated Riddler.)
There’s no question about it: Ledger’s performance is simply stunning. His sociopathic Joker is so good that it’s hard to say that the movie is actually enjoyable to watch—I feel exhausted after seeing it, disturbed and just a little bit broken. In this sense The Dark Knight isn’t really a superhero movie at all, but a horror movie, a slasher flick, and really—with Ledger so famously dead by suicide* just after shooting—a snuff film. As David Denby put the point in the New Yorker:
When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering—in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism—how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.
This is in all respects an astoundingly dark movie that’s hardly suitable for adults, much less children. And if The Dark Knight doesn’t quite possess the necessary sense of self-awareness to be the Watchmen of superhero film, it may well be its Dark Knight Returns (wiki)—or, perhaps more directly, the story from which it draws its most direct inspiration, Alan Moore’s definitive Joker story, The Killing Joke (wiki).
What Moore gets, of course, is what the film is only able to hint at: the extent to which Batman and the Joker (to mix my supervillain metaphors) are two sides of the same coin. It is not just that they are both insane, but that they are both equally insane and insane in exactly the same way—just in opposite directions.
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* Abe rightly points out in the comments that Ledger’s death by overdose probably wasn’t a suicide. Obviously I’m not watching enough entertainment television.