The Dark Knight

FableForge's Foundlings #28: THE DARK KNIGHT meets TOY STORY 2

FableForge — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:11:03 +0000

I know I've done fake trailers before, but I think this is the best of them all. Shot By Shot, this thing stands up.

Enjoy!

Oh, and for comparison purposes, the original:

Bonus: The Lego version:

There. Consider thyselves entertained :)

Long Live The Dark Knight!

Christopher Nolan: Auteur

Brendan Morrisey — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 06:45:14 +0000

I found an amazing youtube video. A montage consisting of all of Christopher Nolan's hollywood films. Probably most of you already know that Nolan is one of my favorite directors out right now, but I never really realized how much his movies really have in common with eachother until after watching this. One theme they all seem to share with eachother is Deception. Characters are always being devcieved in some way. And then of course there's Batman who uses deception as a tool.

Lessons from the DARK KNIGHT

FableForge — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:17:52 +0000

I just finished watching THE DARK KNIGHT, and yesterday I saw BATMAN BEGINS, and I feel my head is in a little bit of a fuzz status, I think I need to watch the second movie again to fully grasp some of the subtler points of the plot.

But already I can tell a couple things about these films, without spoilers. Here, in a stream-of-thought format, more or less, is what I've learned so far about THE DARK KNIGHT:

The Nolan Brothers know no fear. Remember how we've said a couple times on the radio that Hollywood is town dominated by fear? In a way, what we're saying is that there are millionaire bets being made with each production, huge gambles that make or break entire careers; the stakes had never been higher. Our normal human response to high stakes and high uncertainty, is to look for data, any data, any sort of information to reduce the uncertainty even just a little bit. Omens and supersticion are simply the last resort for things simply too unforeseeable to analyze more scientifically. One such thing is people's tastes. So these people, who are gambling their entire livelihoods on their ability to correctly predict people's tastes, look for signs of stability, and this is how conventions are born. Conventions. Action movies must be heavy on action, not so much on plot. Comic based movies must live in a world cheesy enough for crime fighters to wear tights. Movie villians must be morally simple: evil for evil sake, or at most, some misguided excuse. Humanity (or at least a big city!) must be at stake at one point. Movies must have a happy ending. Well, the Nolan Brothers know no fear, and conventions are their bitch:

1. They spent a HUGE long time in BATMAN BEGINS just setting up Bruce Wayne.
2. They didn't give us a clear villian from the get-go, Ras-a-ghoul starts in fact as Batman's mentor.
3. They had THREE (count'em!) Inciting Incidents, all powerful, and none of them pointed towards the climatic ending (well, maybe the third, but its a stretch). For the DARK KNIGHT, man I'm not even sure.
4. They did not aim EITHER movie to children. The Dark Knight, at places, is almost like a horror film.
5. And yet, they know how to game the system. They wanted a PG-13 rating, because everybody knows this makes more money than R, so if you pay attention, there's no blood in this movie. No gore, no guts, no cussing. The joker waves his knife on people's faces all the time, but the fear comes from what he MIGHT do, not what he's actually doing on camera, as far as gore. Its a violent film. But with the right manuevering, they squeezed a PG-13 rating out it.
6. They stayed on message. This movie is a treatise on vigilantism, and on what to do when the System is corrupt.
7. They stayed realistic. It's entirely possible, in a hypothetical world, for someone to have never heard about the Batman character (no comics, no TV series, nothing) and see this movie, and think this is perfectly feasible in our real world given only a few nudges. They found perfectly reasonable explanations for why two-face is burned down the middle, why batman has all his gadgets, where does the batcave come from, the batcomputer, the suit. Its all realistic, and never comes out of thin air.
8. The Joker is a FORCE OF NATURE. I had never seen a character like this. So personal, and yet at the same time, he's like chaos given flesh, an avatar, a symbol, an idea even more than Batman himself is.
9. They dared to go for the ironic endings (in McKee's book, there's three types of endings, uppers, downers and ironics, in increasing degree of difficulty).

Ah, I'll come back to this post later. I need to grok a little bit more on this topic. Cookies to whoever catches where the word grok comes from without resorting to google :)

I said it before but I will say it again

Brendan Morrisey — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 04:42:42 +0000

We need a KC radio episode entirely dedicated to The Dark Knight! Why? Because Christopher Nolan is revolutionizing modern day cinema and this movie is only the beginning of it.

"It isn't an overstatement to call The Dark Knight the most sophisticated and ambitious work of its kind." - IGN

Nolan is one of our smarter directors. He builds movies around ideas and characters, and "Dark Knight" is no exception.The Hollywood Reporter

"It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked. If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up. Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id." - Rolling Stone

"It's the Godfather II of comic book films and three times more earnest than Batman Begins."Kevin Smith

If there ever was a possibility of a summer
film winning Best Picture at the Oscars (like Titanic and Lord Of The
Rings), this will join their ranks. It is rightfully deserved.Delton on IMDB

What do guys think? Is there a possibility that the academy would seriously consider a superhero movie like this such nominations as Heath Leadger's Joker for best supporting actor? Or even the film itself for best movie of the year?

In my opinion, Christopher Nolan is doing something that we haven't see since the 70's. He's making Summer Blockbusters so that they're treated seriously again. Straying from what they were thought of as back when we had movies like
Armageddon and Independence Day, and taking them to the same level as films that had both the spectacle and the depth like The Godfather and The Exorcist had.