Dark Knight At Midnight

Caught the 11:59 p.m. Thursday show of The Dark Knight this past week, and it pretty much kicks as much ass as everyone says it does. Oh, Christian Bale's Batman voice is ludicrous (he sounds like he smokes five packs of cigarettes a day), as are the Caped Crusader's stupid speeches about morality, good, evil, white knights, and all that horseshit. But to make up for that, the Joker's many voices and laughs are creepy cool, and his speeches are a lot more coherent and entertaining. In fact, I'm pretty sure that director Chris Nolan avoided making another boring as fuck movie like Batman Begins by saying, whenever things started to lag in this film, "Hey, let's have another Joker scene." Heath Ledger's Clown Prince of Crime is electric in every single frame, and all the teenyboppers out there might have gone to the theaters this weekend to catch a glimpse of a dead dreamboat, but it's the Joker that will haunt them. Of course, the movie is long, but there's a lot going on. I wuz worried that Nolan would be jugging too much to inject D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and more generic mobsters into this film, but somehow it works to show what true villainy is when ordinary criminals are stacked up against a monster like the Joker, and Harvey Dent is a good heroic everyman to embody that battle between good and evil (and good becoming evil to fight it). That's why we don't need the speeches. It's all acted out already.