The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight is the sequel to 2005’s Batman Begins, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Remember when Batman came out in 1989 and everyone was wondering whether it would be a campy film like the 60s TV series which had influenced 1978’s Superman to its detriment? Fans lauded Tim Burton’s take on the caped crusader for being dark and serious.

Well, Burton ain’t got nuthin’ on Christopher Nolan, director of the current franchise.

Here, Batman (Christian Bale) and squeaky-clean district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) are on the verge of shutting down Gotham’s crime families, especially after Batman manages to haul in the crime lords’ “accountant” from Hong Kong. The crime lords get into bed with the maniacal Joker (Heath Ledger) to take out Batman, and the Joker sets out to do in all the big names who are maintaining law and order in Gotham, showing himself capable of intricate, seemingly-impossible crimes of murder and mass destruction.

Batman’s alter ego, Bruce Wayne, has high hopes that Dent can be the hero Gotham need and that he can put aside his double identity and marry his childhood sweetheart, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal). But, unable to wait for Bruce forever, Rachel is not only working with Harvey in his office, but dating his publicly. Which, of course, also puts her in the line of fire of the mob and the Joker.

The Dark Knight is a very dark film indeed, even though much of it takes place in the daytime: Harvey, Rachel, Lieutenant Gordon (Gary Oldman), the commissioner, the mayor, all the good guys are constantly under siege by people who vanish in the shadows after striking. The Gotham police department is deeply corrupt, which bothers Dent to no end even though he knows that dirty cops are better than the only alternative, which is no cops at all. It makes the film feel constantly suspenseful, even in the daylight scenes, even in places we expect will be safe for the heroes. Only his secret identity gives Batman himself any safety. (Although one does wonder why Bruce Wayne isn’t a high-profile target for the criminals of Gotham.)

Ledger is quite good as the Joker. Jack Nicholson’s performance in the 1989 film also drew kudos, but I always thought he was just playing ‘nutty old Jack Nicholson’, and I thought his performance was a low point of that film. Ledger is dark and menacing and convincing in being “crazy like a fox”, the sort of crazy where he’s willing to do anything to get what he wants, and where his appearance makes others underestimate him, often for the last time. Is his performance worthy of an Oscar, as has been suggested? I didn’t think so, but he did do a good job.

The film is a fine suspense and action-adventure piece. What makes it really work is that there’s some real characterization behind the cape: Bruce isn’t as meaty a character here as he was in Batman Begins, but Harvey, Rachel and Lt. Gordon all pick up the slack and contribute to giving the film more heft than just a lot of chasing and fighting and lunacy, it gives the characters something to fight for.

Despite that, the film does have its flaws. First, it’s overlong, with perhaps one too many clever plans of the Joker’s that Batman has to stop, and one too many nifty gimmicks that Batman can employ – his little trick with Lucius Fox’s (Morgan Freeman) latest technological innovation was cool, but implausible and unnecessary. Second, while the resolution of the Bruce-Harvey-Rachel triangle works for the film (though it’s not a happy ending), the Batman-Harvey-Joker triangle ends rather anticlimactically, separating the Joker and Harvey into two separate threads when it would have been far more satisfying to have them all merge together in the final fight against the Joker. While the Joker’s character is rife with meaning, I thought Nolan missed a chance to imbue Harvey Dent’s fate with the same degree of meaning – or at least a demonstration that even the Joker should sometimes be careful what he wishes for.

Still, The Dark Knight is quite a good film, stylish and intense. Definitely not a kids’ film, as there are some pretty brutal scenes. But maybe the most serious superhero film ever made. Which shows how far we’ve come in 40 years.

A few more, spoiler-laden comments after the cut:

Continue reading “The Dark Knight”

T.G.I.F. Dammit

All things considered, this has been a pretty crappy week:

  • A couple of last-minute, difficult projects landed on my shoulders this week, resulting in a great deal of stress for me at work. I managed to finish one today and make progress on the other one, but man, it was a rough week. And of course the things I’d planned to work on got deferred in the meantime. Sigh.
  • Debbi has her own job stress, since the majority shareholder of the company she works for has made an offer to buy the rest of the company. I’ve never been part of a corporate buyout, never mind one of this magnitude, but I’m sure this makes everyone who works there uneasy, since who knows how things might change if the buyout takes place?
  • We’re painting our townhouse complex soon, and I realized that my vegetable garden runs right along one of the exterior walls, so now I’m stressed out that I might need to pull out the vegetables just as they’re ripening in order to allow the painters access. Gah! Maybe I can cover them with tarps for the days they’ll be painting there, or maybe I can offer to paint that section myself after the growing season is over. Sigh.

So I’m really glad it’s Friday, because I’m exhausted and frazzled.

On the bright side:

  • I upgraded my journal to WordPress 2.6 and started having a couple of problems with it. But I eventually discovered that one problem was due to having the wrong bookmark to access the admin pages of my journal (I’d bookmarked the login page rather than the admin page), and the other was because I’d been editing some old entries recently which explained why Akismet‘s “automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month” feature seemed to be broken – editing the entries apparently re-set their age counter, so I’m getting a little more spam in my spam trap than I used to. But, it looks like it’s all good in the end.

    (All that said, I am really looking forward to using the “live preview” feature of WordPress 2.6, as I’ve wanted to switch to a new journal template for FP for months now.)
  • I got to play poker last night with friends, and finished up a few bucks in our low-stakes game. All of my profits came from a single hand when my set of Jacks beat pocket Aces. I also managed to get away with losing the minimum when my A-Q hit top pair on the flop, and I folded to two bets – correctly, as it turned out as I was up against Aces again. I’m far from a great player, but I seem to be holding my own in this group.
  • And Debbi and I went to my favorite Italian restaurant for dinner tonight. Yay!

I think we’re going to have a low-key weekend. We have a few chores to do, but otherwise we need to empty our brains and de-stress.

This Week’s Haul

The smallest week in recent memory:

  • Tangent: Superman’s Reign #5 of 12, by Dan Jurgen, Jamal Ingle & Robin Riggs, and Ron Marz, Fernando Pasarin & Matt Banning (DC)
  • Astro City: The Dark Age book 1 HC, by Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson & Alex Ross (DC/Wildstorm)
  • The Perhapanauts #3, by Todd Dezago & Craig Rousseau (Image)
Astro City: The Dark Age book 1 HC On the bright side, the week did deliver the hardcover collection of Astro City: The Dark Age book 1, collecting the first half of this longest of Astro City stories.

I won’t go into detail about what Astro City is about (after all, you can read about it yourself), but as for this volume: The story covers the 1970s, a period of Astro City largely skipped over by earlier stories, except for the hint of the hero the Silver Agent, a sort of Captain America figure who is featured on a monument in the city dedicated to “our eternal shame”. This story fills in some of the blanks in the Agent’s story, while raising new questions.

The prologue takes place in 1959, when the brothers Charles and Royal Williams witness a fight between the Honor Guard (Astro City’s equivalent of the Justice League or Avengers) and a crop of villains. We later learn that disaster befell the Williams family that evening. Jumping forward to 1972, Charles has become a cop who’s suspicious of the heroes, while Royal has become a small-time crook, and the two have a strained relationship. The book is nominally their story, although there’s so much more going on that they simply get more pages than any other set of characters, plus they narrate the tale, but it’s not entirely their story. They follow the tragedy which befalls the Silver Agent, and Charles gets wrapped up in a police corruption ring while Royal hooks up with one of the city’s crime lords. The second half of the volume grows increasingly complex with threats to the city and the world, mysterious figures pursuing strange agendas, and the big mystery of the Agent. This volume ends in 1977, and the second volume will likely cover the next 5 years.

Astro City has long been a favorite of mine, and it’s fair to say I think it’s the best superhero comic of the last 15 years. But The Dark Age isn’t the book at its best. There’s too much going on, and with tantalizing glimpses of neat stuff going on, but not a feel of a whole lot of progress. A big part of the problem is that neither of the Williams brothers are very compelling as characters, certainly nowhere near the protagonists of the two earlier long-form stories, Confession (my favorite volume in the series) or The Tarnished Angel. They’re realistic and sympathetic, but the story goes for scale and intricacy rather than depth and character, and that doesn’t play to the series’ strength. Indeed, the series has often used the feeling of scale and depth of “real” superhero stories as a mere springboard for a moving character piece, so turning the series’ formula on its head just makes it feel a little less special. And the intricacy probably makes it a lot less accessible to new readers.

All that said, there’s still a lot here to delight the regular readers of Astro City, as mysteries of the city’s past are brought to light. And the book reads much better in a single shot than as a serial, especially given how slowly the series has come out in recent years. Brent Anderson’s art is stylish and dynamic as always, chock-full of fun character designs and settings (by Anderson and Alex Ross) and a terrific coloring job.

I guess The Dark Age is only disappointing by comparison with earlier Astro City volumes, which frankly were often just plain amazing. It’s still pretty good and rewards re-reading. And as this is only the first half of the story, I have to allow for the chance that there will be a great payoff to all this set-up in the end. Meanwhile, this is all we’ve got, and with the series’ erratic schedule we can’t know when we’ll see the next set of issues in the series.

Hopefully it won’t be too long.

Mass Transit

Yesterday we did something rather eccentric: We rode VTA light rail from downtown Mountain View to Downtown Campbell, just ’cause.

I’ve actually wanted to ride the light rail for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it because, well, light rail in the valley doesn’t really go places I want to go, and it’s a lot slower than driving (3-4 times slower). The big problem is that downtown San Jose just isn’t a destination for me; I go there maybe 3 times a year, usually for fairly random things. Otherwise light rail mostly goes through residential and office neighborhoods.

However, I do enjoy riding the train just for the experience, and also to see where it goes and what the neighborhoods are like. It goes through a lot of back-avenue areas in Mountain View before running down the middle of streets in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose, so there was a lot to see that I hadn’t seen before, not to mention watching people getting on and off. A lot off teenagers ride the train and switch at the Tasman station, probably to go to the Great Mall in Milpitas (another non-destination for me).

Downtown Campbell has changed a lot since I lived there in 1999-2001: Aside from the light rail, they’ve built several new commercial buildings and a parking garage, so there are more stores and restaurants worth visiting. It’s no longer a depressing little avenue of antique stores with minimal foot traffic. We had lunch at Stacks and poked our heads into several stores and enjoyed the lovely weather. Then we headed back to the train and reversed our commute.

This probably sounds like a pretty weird day out, but I enjoyed it. Why did I enjoy it? That’s a good question. I think I’ve always enjoyed watching the ebb and flow of the city, seeing how things have been built up and torn down and looking for old things among the newer things. There’s a lot to see in this way when riding the T in Boston, and while there’s less out here there are still some interesting tidbits: The closed-and-abandoned building and parking lot that looks like it used to be an activity center, with basketball and volleyball nets in the parking lot. The older rail lines on which the light rail was built, whose remnants are still lying around. The vacant storefronts in downtown San Jose, just a block away from a fairly-busy dining district. And, just sitting on the train being taken somewhere is a lot more relaxing than driving. Slower, but more relaxing.

I think Debbi finds my interest in taking the light rail for no particular reason to be pretty odd, although she was the one to suggest indulging my weird desire a couple of days ago (though I’d talked about it a few times in the past). But I enjoy doing things with no particular aim in mind from time to time. And at least this one got us out of the house!

This Week’s Haul

  • Action Comics #867, by Geoff Johns, Gary Frank & Jon Sibal (DC)
  • Booster Gold #1,000,000, by Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund (DC)
  • Justice Society of America #17, by Geoff Johns, Alex Ross, Fernando Pasarin & Prentis Rollins (DC)
  • Guardians of the Galaxy #3, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar (Marvel)
  • Nova #15, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Wallington Alves & Scott Hanna (Marvel)
  • Astonishing X-Men #25, by Warren Ellis & Simone Bianchi (Marvel)
  • B.P.R.D.: The Warning #1 of 5, by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis (Dark Horse)
Booster Gold #1000000 Geoff Johns & Jeff Katz’ run on Booster Gold ends with issue #1,000,000 – an homage of sorts to the DC One Million company event of last decade, much like there was an issue #0 retroactively tying in to the Zero Hour event. Cute, but this sort of in-joke amidst the more serious story has been the series’ stock-in-trade all along. Anyway, the pair put out an even dozen issues of the series, and it’s been consistently smart and enjoyable.

The series’ premise involves Booster Gold being recruited by Rip Hunter (Time Master) to help stop people who are changing history. Rip’s true identity is a mystery, and he’s something of a hard-ass. At first Booster is willing to go along, but then he gets it into his head that he could use his time-travelling devices to save his best friend, Blue Beetle, from having been killed in Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Rip does his level best to prove to Booster that he can’t truly change history, but Booster does anyway, saving Beetle but at the price of Maxwell Lord and his legion of OMACs wiping out most of the heroes on Earth. To stop this, Beetle volunteers to go back to sacrifice himself to put things back the way they should be.

All that being behind us, this issue is the denouement, which nicely wraps up most of the major plot elements, gives Booster a happy ending (hearkening back to his first series, back in the 1980s), and throws in some other neat stuff before spending a page foreshadowing what’s coming up in the next year. Which will be written by someone other than Johns and Katz, but that’s okay.

You don’t need to have read all the backstory to fully enjoy Booster Gold, although it does help. But the central tension between Booster and Rip, and Booster’s friendship with Blue Beetle, works even if you’re largely ignorant of what’s gone before, and this issue is a fine wrap-up to the arc of the past year. (Even if it didn’t address Johanna Carlson’s concerns, I think it’s still a nicely optimistic wrap-up.)

And penciller Dan Jurgens – who co-created Booster Gold when he broke into comics in the 80s – deserves a lot of credit for the run, too. I’ve never been Jurgens’ biggest fan – his art is a little too posed and polished for my tastes – but he’s always been a decent creator, and I think he’s done some of his best work ever on this run, and frankly the story really demanded a clean line and straightforward layouts because there was always so much going on. It really played to Jurgens’ strengths.

So, good show, guys. Maybe Geoff Johns’ best run since The Flash. Here’s hoping the next year is as good.

Astonishing X-Men #25 I decided to give Astonishing X-Men a try after learning that Warren Ellis is writing it. Ellis is one of those writers who’s full of ideas, but his execution is very hit-or-miss. He’s similar to Grant Morrison in this way, except that Ellis generally has more depth and character to his stories. So he’s written the outstanding Planetary, but also some pretty unreadable stuff from Avatar.

Astonishing X-Men is looking like it’s below the median in his range. It’s got yet another sequence in which the writer sets up the book with his group of X-Men (if this wasn’t a tired gimmick when Morrison did it in New X-Men, it certainly was when Joss Whedon did it at the beginning of this series), the obligatory clever dialogue to set up minor character conflicts (with the obligatory Wolverine snark amidst it all), and then we’re off on our first mission. All rather routine stuff.

Simone Bianchi’s art is pretty good, although it’s not very dynamic and it feels pretty muddy – it looks like it was shot straight from pencils, and that’s a hard look to pull off. (Not everyone can be – or should try to be – Mike Grell or Michael Zulli.)

I’ll check out a few more issues to see if it finds its wings, but the early returns aren’t promising.

WALL-E

I never went to see Ratatouille, since the premise didn’t appeal to me and something about Brad Bird’s approach to story construction puts me off (The Incredibles could have been a great film, but it’s rather an unfocused hodge-podge), but tonight we resumed riding the Pixar bandwagon by going to see WALL-E.

It’s a cute film. It does a terrific job of portraying the eponymous character’s unending life as nearly the last living thing on a used-up, abandoned Earth. Without dialogue, but with plenty of body language, WALL-E conveys his begrudging acceptance of his workaday life, with his hopes and dreams behind it. And when the more advanced robot Eve shows up on a mission, his realization that his dreams could come true is quite poignant. From there the film turns into a madcap adventure as we find out what happened to humanity, and WALL-E and Eve try to complete Eve’s mission and figure each other out (not necessarily in that order.

The film is at its best when it’s dealing with the robots – and there are plenty of them – but at its worst when dealing with the humans, and what they’ve become after 700 years. Okay, it’s a cautionary tale about out consumer culture, but it has all the finesse of a sledgehammer to the forehead, with people having become obese and slothful, entirely reliant on stimuli from the computer network. It’s not like it’s particularly new, either; except for the fat angle, it’s pretty much the same premise as that of Adventure Comics #379, which was published around the time I was born. I think if they’d come up with a more nuanced explanation for humanity’s absence it would have been a much better film.

Still, the robots are at the front and center, and that makes it a fun film despite its flaws. WALL-E is a terrific-looking creation, expressive and sympathetic, and Eve isn’t far behind him. And the film is touching and funny and exciting as WALL-E and Eve try to get together. The animation is stunning, of course, and the music is very distinctive compared to earlier Pixar films. Overall, a fun film.

Topping it off – actually leading it off – is the short before the film, “Presto”, which is absolutely hilarious, as good as any old Warner Bros cartoon. Sometimes it seems like the shorts are better than the features!

Minor Details

Leftfield.org is down right now. Ceej is apparently going to swap out the machine tomorrow, as the old machine was apparently on its last legs and frying hard drives left and right. Hopefully she’ll be able to retrieve all the old data – especially my e-mail.

Leftfield being down always stresses me out more than I feel it should.

Anyway, send me e-mail via this site in the meantime.

We’re experiencing another heat wave in the Bay Area this week, although it’s not as bad as the last two; highs in the low 90s where I am, and temperatures down to a bearable 80 degrees by 7 pm, and in the low 70s by bedtime. It should break on Friday and be a nice weekend.

I finally went out and bought a new garbage disposal for the kitchen sink, as the old one has been busticated for a couple of years. I hired a contractor through Sears to install it, as it seemed like a little more work than I wanted to put in. I’m willing to screw with the electrical system in my house for fun and education, but I don’t really want to mess with the water system, as I think I could really do some damage if I screw it up. Anyway, the contractor’s coming out tomorrow. Hopefully it will all go smoothly.

And that’s the news.

This Week’s Haul

Actually last week’s haul, but since this week’s haul is delayed ’til Thursday due to Independence Day, I figure I get a little bit of a grace period:

  • Fables #74, by Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham & Steve Leialoha (DC/Vertigo)
  • Legion of Super-Heroes #43, by Jim Shooter, Francis Manapul & Livesay (DC)
  • Avengers/Invaders #3 of 12, by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger & Steve Sadowski (Marvel)
  • Echo #3, by Terry Moore (Abstract)
  • Hellboy: The Crooked Man #1 of 3, by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben (Dark Horse)
  • The Boys #20, by Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson (Dynamite)
  • Star Trek: Assignment Earth #3 of 12, by John Byrne (IDW)
  • The Sword: Fire vol 1 TPB, by Joshua Luna & Jonathan Luna (Image)
The Sword vol 1 TPB The Luna brothers’ last project was Girls a suspense/horror story in which a small town was enclosed in a force field while being overrun with an army of cloned girls who wanted to kill all the women in town. It was mainly a psychological drama about how the poor souls trapped in the town dealt with their situation (mostly not very well).

Their latest project is The Sword, which is more adventure than horror, but contains the same elements of suspense that were present in Girls. Our heroine, Dara Brighton, is a paraplegic living with her family. One evening three strangers barge into their house, accuse Dara’s father of being their lifelong nemesis, display fantastic powers, and kill her family – and nearly her. However, the ensuing fire drops her below the house, where she grasps an ancient sword which not only cures her paralysis, but gives her super powers of her own. This being a suspense story there are hijinks, such as being hunted by the police, and losing the sword at an inopportune time. And the volume wraps up with an explanation of where the sword came from, and why those three were chasing Dara’s father to get it.

The Luna brothers’ style is based in a realistic looking and feeling world, into which these fantastic things are dropped. Jonathan Luna’s layouts are simple and understated, with uncomplicated finishes, usually with a constant line width in his inks, making the art seem even more unpretentious. As with Girls, The Sword‘s story focuses on the characters’ reactions to the amazing things they’re experiencing, which are typically enough to push most of them to their breaking points.

All of which makes their stories stand out pretty well from the rest of the comics being published. It doesn’t necessarily make them great comics, though; they are, after all, pretty firmly grounded in pulpy suspense fiction, just with more fallible protagonists. And the character bits take a back seat to the adventure bits, which hold back the story’s full potential. The flaw in the art is that it’s so unassuming that the fantastic events themselves seem unassuming, so their impact is lessened.

So it’s entertaining stuff, but it’s different without being really better than your mainstream superhero comic. Bloodier, certainly (the death count in The Sword is both significant and graphic). But it’s worth a look for a change of pace from the usual comics rigamarole.

Slightly Freaky

So tonight Debbi and I are playing some Gin Rummy when we hear Blackjack let out a frightened yowl. We turn around and see him in the kitchen, low to the ground, looking totally freaked out. He’s looking under the stove or fridge and crawling with his belly on the ground. I pick him up and he clings to me like Roulette does when she’s scared or upset. But Blackjack is rarely scared or upset. I give him to Debbi and she carries him to the couch, where he lies on her like a lump.

I look around in the kitchen but don’t see anything. I also go look around upstairs, with the other cats following my around. They’re also a little agitated and want to smell Blackjack when we put him back on the floor.

We were pretty baffled about what had gotten into him. My best guesses were that he was feeling sick, or that he was freaked out by the occasional day-after firecracker we heard, or (and here’s a pleasant thought) that there’s an intruder in the house. The last thought wasn’t made better by noticing that the dome light in my car was on for some reason, although it’s possible we either turned it on accidentally today, or that we turned it on last night while we were stuck in traffic coming back from fireworks (when we often turned off the engine and played some rummy since traffic was at a dead stop for minutes at a time).

However, we eventually heard another firecracker go off, and Blackjack quickly high-tailed it upstairs and hid in the closet. So I’m pretty sure he’s just scared to death of fireworks, while the other cats are a little agitated by them but not too freaked out. We’ve been out of town for the last two July Fourths so we haven’t recently seen what he thinks about the fireworks.

So that’s made for a rather creepy evening. But hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow.

I feel really bad for Blackjack, though. Poor guy.