the dark knight vs. mamma mia

thursday night we traveled to dutch square to see the dark knight at midnight with some of our friends. i'm going to give it 9/10 snaps. it could have been 10, really. for those of you who haven't seen it yet, do not wait till the end of the credits, there's nothing there and skip the rest of this paragraph and the next if you don't want spoilers. it's definitely theater worthy and being that it brought in over $66 million on its opening day pretty much everyone else agrees. i'm going to stick to what i thought were the worst parts of the film since 85% of the movie was great and i don't have the time to post about 85% of the film. the dark knight had this unfortunate thing i call the ai effect. named for steven spielberg's artificial intelligence: ai. in ai the movie should have ended when david [haley joel osment] ended up in the bottom of the ocean with his lovely teddy bear but instead spielberg decided to throw in aliens just for shits and giggles. this year's batman film had a similar deal going on. they should have stopped the movie with the portion where the joker escapes prison and proceeds to blow up gotham general. but no, christopher nolan decided that they could fit two-face into this film as well. unfortunately for mr. nolan, movies have some sort of time constraint unless you're quentin tarantino.

maybe heath ledger was a bit crazy before he died because he sure as hell did an awesome job acting psychotic. anytime the joker was around, a great scene was unfolding. phenomenal in fact. then you have the rest of the cast...christian bale did well, but in scenes not involving the joker, he just didn't seem as invested in the role of batman/bruce wayne. michael caine, gary oldamn, and morgan freeman were spot on with their roles. maggie gyllenhaal was just plain boring. i really didn't care that they killed her off. i felt no empathy whatsoever. the only pang of sympathy i did experience was for batman for being tricked into rescuing the wrong person. the sad thing is i know she could've done better. i've seen her in other films where she's done wonderfully well such as mona lisa smile and stranger than fiction. aaron eckhart by far gets the award for most awful performance in the dark knight. while eckhart makes for a great harvey dent, he is uber awful as two-face. i guess this could also have to do with my preconceived notion of how two-face would/should act. he needed to be crueller and obsessed with that coin deciding everything for him. and because of the ai effect the movie experienced, there just wasn't enough time to fully explore and build this character because in essence he was ai's aliens. more of an afterthought that would have been better to leave out of this particular film. he needed more time to grow into the role and i think a separate film featuring two-face and possibly another villain from the batman universe would be more appropriate. it doesn't help eckhart either that ledger's job was so wonderful, his seemed even worse in comparison. i fully expected them to kill the joker off at the end seeing as how NO ONE will be able to perform that role as well as ledger did and yet they kept him alive and apparently killed off two-face. i would not be surprised if two-face resurfaces as they never show an actual funeral [the bit at the end could've just been a press conference]. if i could vote on villains for the next batman movie i'd love to see some actual kick-ass women playing harlequin and catwoman [i vote michelle rodriguez and milla jovovich, they did a great job with resident evil].

on friday i again visited dutch square this time with my aunt to see mamma mia. i was actually surprised by how much i enjoyed it. 8/10 snaps. everyone did a great job and it was neat to see colin firth, stellan skarsgard, and pierce brosnan in flamenco dancer outfits. pretty humorous film but definitely more of a chick flick plus you're going to have to enjoy musicals a bit if you're going to see this one as well.

i'm back at work on a saturday so i'm going to get moving so i can get out of here.

enjoy the silence.

-pyper