& a blog

i recently caught a pretty underground flick at the fenway regal. you might not have heard of it. it’s called “the dark knight” and it’s about a rich, urban billionaire who spends his evenings fighting crime as a super hero in a city called gotham. apparently, this dramatis persona, called “bruce wayne,” is a recurring character in american cinema and has been making pretty good money on the independent film circuit.

but seriously, “the dark knight” came out, and the world was like, whoa.

i finally got to see it on thursday, two weeks after the beastie came out. it wasn’t like i didn’t want to see it, in fact, i went to the theater twice in the interim, but both times it was sold out. on thursday, the family decided to get there a full hour early.

i had a lot of anxiety in the two weeks between the film’s release and my eyes finally partaking of it. i was terrified that someone was going to reveal the ending, or what happens, or whatever. it’s wasn’t has bad as the harry potter 7 syndrome (where the world was ready to beat up whoever ruined their reading) but it was bad

the dark knight was glorious. dark, foreboding, terrifying, gut-wrenching. it’s primary theme, in my estimation, is the pain of conflict. through the film, tension is created by potent binaries, batman and the joker, the joker and the crime world, batman and bruce wayne, which of the two ferryboats will destroy the other. whenever a binary is created, the relationship can be explosive, but it is generally stable.

however, whenever a trio is established (bruce wayne-harvey dent-kate or commissioner gordon-harvey dent-batman) it is doomed to fail at great cost to its members. in fact, when the bruce-harvey-kate trio falls, harvey becomes inscribed with the sign of the binary of conflict (his two faces) and batman is forced back into his wayne-batman binary where he thought he might escape through kate.

when the second trio collapses (harvey turns evil, so the triumveriate of gordon-dent-batman unravels) batman must become an anti-hero, losing not only his political stake in the world of gotham, but denying his heroism. which. is. genius.

undeniably a great film. not an outstanding 100 pagemaster film (see zackipedia for information), but damn good.

which is largely because it fulfils the mccune action movie criterion, see below.

zack’s successful action movie criterion:

1. a good soundtrack… is so overrated. when a piece of music can cue your very memory/enthusiasm for a film, you know you have a strong piece of creative energy to work off for film production. take indiana jones for example. in that film, all you have to do is hear the bugles and you’re ready to ride off into the sunset.

the last movie to have a solid soundtrack was pirates of the caribbean, but there were others before that (lotr, star wars, matrix, etc.)

2. bad guys you actually care about… not hate. hating a villain is easy, just have him do some fucked/perverted stuff and instantly the crowd is on your side (see gladiator et al). but a far more compelling thing to do is to actually make compelling villains who may be more interesting that the protagonists. you want conflict in the viewers to complement conflict in the characters, so don’t make things black (bad) and white (good).

make the audience struggle.

in the dark knight, the audience really struggles, particularly as harvey dent exchanges his heroism for villainy. and you forgive him for it. genius.

3. scenes with dialog … and not shitty, mid-battle dialog either. i’m talking two characters sitting down, talking things out rather than just fighting. most action films just want to keep things kicking, screaming, jumping out of buildings, and killing people. good action movies remember to let their characters catch their breath, and speak. see the matrix or pulp fiction for details.

4. moments of audience bewilderment… not confusion or apathy. like that moment nearing the beginning of batman where he deploys a “skyhook” to pull him out of a building onto to a jumbo jet.

i was all like, wow.

and you should have at three of those in a good action movie. any more and its annoying. any less, and it’s unimaginative.

5. an unexpected loss … makes victory so much (bitter) sweeter. it also reminds you that you can’t win without casualties. and they need to be unexpected, which generally means important. see albus dumbledore’s death in hp 6, a loss i’m still working through emotionally.

6. an unclean conclusion … feels like reality. don’t wrap it up perfectly. leave work to be done. because if this movie was good we want to see another one, and it wasn’t at least we know they could have another chance to make things right using my simple, step-by-step criterion.

ya heard?