Half-Masked

Guess what this post contains? Here’s a hint: It rhymes with: “FPOILERS“.

Whoa. I didn’t know I could use smileys here. Kind of sad that I only figured this out now. <.<;

~~~

You know that sound that you hear whenever you turn on a car radio, no matter what station it’s on? That whiny, white, teenagery sound? Filled with clumsy, overly simplistic “they probably thought this was more clever than it actually is” guitar and drum compositions? The kind of manufactured crap that wouldn’t even qualify to be featured in Guitar Hero?

(I’m trying to come up with a specific example, but you all know what I’m talking about. I know that you know, because there are approximately 14 googol bands like that in North America alone. And chances are, at least 12 of them are in your own personal Top 10. You tools.)

Yeah, THAT’S the sound Square-Enix decided should accompany the big, final, apocalyptic battle against their allegory for Satan. That’s the last boss music in Dissidia: Final Fantasy, an upcoming PSP fighter game starring an all-star cast of Final Fantasy characters duking it out. Complete with lyrics about “pilgrims” and “marching bands“. Definitely appropriate mental imagery for sword-fighting a giant, 4-armed demon monster on his volcanic throne, determining the fate of an ethereal fantasy world. You tools.

“Surely this cave-troll is exaggerating”, you must be thinking. I don’t blame you. I know I have a tendency to display my opinions in a polar fashion(either something is awesome or it’s Crap Mountain, you could say). To get a good idea for just how bad it is, here is a video of “Chaos“(supposedly the most fearsome opponent in the game) getting his ass handed to him by a giggling, levitating midget with magic powers.

And all I could think was: “You know, the music was the most ridiculous part of that video”.

This looks like the right place for a Green Day song, AMIRITE

…Actually, you know what? I think I like the music. The actual composition and instruments, I mean. It’s the god-awful “losing contestant from American Idol” vocals that I object to. It’s just so out of place and inappropriate given the context, and the lyrics are idiotic horse shit. And that atrocious -noise- the person makes in lieu of singing smothers anything the music does right. It makes me remember Shamus Young’s thoughts on the “Achievement Unlocked!” messages in Xbox 360 games.

“It’s like hearing Bob Barker shouting: “A New Car!” during the shower scene in Psycho.”

You know it’s bad when one of the leading game developers starts taking cues from those horrible youtube AMV’s, with Evanescence songs played over mashed-up clips of Sonic X.

The same “band” responsible for that unpleasantness has a similar song in the OST, for the Goddess of light, goodness, fluffy kittens, etc. That one starts out with a female vocalist who, in a shocking turn of events, actually has some singing talent. She is drowned out of that song about a third of the way through, by the ever-present nasally emo anthem. Wouldn’t want people to enjoy what they’re hearing, I guess… Even though the game is filled with cool remixes of Final Fantasy music, which makes this final boss track stand out like a dried-up cat turd on a chocolate sundae.

I can understand if one song was done with female vocals and the other with a male singer. That makes sense in context and in theory, considering the characters these themes are written for and represent happen to be female and male respectively(”Cosmos” and “Chaos”). The female vocals would make sense for the peaceful woman character who is a force for good. But how exactly is James Blunt the appropriate choice for a hellish monster king devoted to endless destruction and warfare?

And did he really have to whore the attention for the “Good” God track too? Why did he have to ruin that? Whoever that lady was, she was doing a good enough job on her own. She didn’t need YOU there mucking it up, No-Talent Man. Having vocals in final boss music doesn’t always hurt(”One Winged Angel” ring a bell?). Having vocals provided by someone who fucking couldn’t sing his way out of a paper bag does.

I mean, we’re not expecting Terms of Endearment here. This is basically Fan-Service: The Video Game. There is a story in there, I’m told, but we’re paying to see big-name video game characters beat the crap out of each other in cool ways, with some hard-rocking music backing it up. This is not hard, Squenix. So when you set up an entire game to conclude with a hyperactive, kinetic fight against the very God of evil, random and meaningless violence, is it too much to ask that you get somebody other than Panic! At The Disco to provide the accompanying music?

Pictured: Someone who probably isn't fond of My Chemical Romance

END OF LINE

~A.H.

So, it turns out there is at least one good thing about Castlevania: Judgement.

(the music, not the tits.)

Also, one of the playable characters is Death. Isn’t that a little unfair to the other characters? How the fuck do they fight that?! =P

END OF LINE

~A.H.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s Shit Final Boss music post, let me clarify something: I honestly would have no problem with the song they chose for the climax of Dissidia: Final Fantasy, if it weren’t for the horrendous vocals. Even keep the lame lyrics, I don’t care. The song that’s buried underneath that oral refuse isn’t so bad. It just needed someone with greater range than Stephen Hawking to sing it.

It reminded me of a song from Blue Dragon called “Eternity“. Listen to those guitar riffs, the keyboards, the drums. That is not terrible music. But you’d be lying if you said that wasn’t some of the worst “singing” you’ve ever heard in your life. The notes aren’t the problem; the singer just can’t hit them. Or in this case, the problem is he sung the song in the vein of an old, buck-toothed, gray-bearded, gold-rush era prospector. Do these people really think that sounds good? Vocals like that belong in a Nobuo Uematsu battle them like a Locust head belongs in an antique case.

It’s like going to a restaurant that serves your favourite food, but the waiter craps on it before he serves it to you. Then he has the nerve to call it “seasoning“. How much would you hate Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”, if Soldja Boy did a duet with Barry Manilow over the guitar solo? I don’t know why so many people are anxious to kill a good thing.

If you would like to break into the market for making good music and then shitting on it with your complete lack of singing talent, it’s a very simple process(and cost-effective, since you’ll save money on all of those pesky singing lessons). In fact, “The Killers” seem to have carved out a career based on the following three rules:

1. Make pretty decent music
2. Ruin it with a terrible, whiny vocal performance(goth poetry session-esque lyrics optional) &
3. Have the arrogance and contempt for your audience to not release the Instrumental version of the song, to give the impression that you deliberately wish harm upon their ears.

I hereby dub this the “Star Salzman Effect“. Man, that guy would be like, my favourite OCRemixer if he’d just shut the fuck up. Or, you know, hire someone who can actually sing for him(isn’t that what Pixietricks is there for? To enhance good music with great vocals? It’s not like she charges a thousand dollars a remix, Sal. I’m sure even in this time of economic uncertainty, you could afford the expense to make your remixes not sound like ass.

Or barring that, just leave out the singing altogether. That Mega Man X ‘mix you did alone is movie-quality, right up until you start blathering about video game guides.)

END OF LINE

~A.H.

You may think you have seen “cute” before. Maybe your cat had a litter of kittens, little paws and faces struggling to stand upright, making those pathetic little mewling sounds. Some people think the all-consuming shit-factories known as “babies” are cute. Maybe you saw a photo of a baby next to a box of kittens, and perhaps the baby was dressed in the manner of a kitten, and thought that was the cutest thing you’d ever seen.

I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. No matter what you may think is the cutest sight you have ever witnessed, you are wrong. You are wrong, and the cutest thing you will ever see in your drab, meaningless existence is “Chiyo-chan”, the 11-year old genius schoolgirl from Azumanga Daioh.

Cuter than the assembly line at a button factory

If you don’t believe me, watch the first episode. No, go ahead. I’ll wait.

…

….

……

Did you watch it?

Then congratulations! You now have Diabetes. And if you think that was cute, wait ’til the episode where she wears a penguin-suit.

WARNING! EXCEEDING MAXIMUM CUTENESS LEVELS!

Now, if she were just there to be adorable, that’d be more than enough. But Chiyo is often the moral centre of the show. She’s got a terrific attitude, is always considerate of other people’s feelings and maintains an upbeat look at life. And if you managed to survive the onslaught of cuteness in the first 10 minutes, you’d see that even the most jaded and world-weary teachers are not immune to having their heart-strings pulled in her presence. And despite being privileged, she doesn’t appear to have a single selfish bone in her body. She’s a reminder of how we should all be treating each other and ourselves.

This picture isn't so sweet when you find out the guy in the suit's a sex offender

A lot of American animation either tends to make the cute characters superfluous (outside of merchandising), or secretly bitter, self-absorbed monsters who use that to get what they want. There is a mindset that anything that looks that innocent is probably hiding some dark and ugly personality. Surely it’s too good to be true, right?

But when the teacher is cracking down on students who didn’t do their homework, does Chiyo look like she’s “just trying to get out of a punishment”? I don’t think so. She takes pride in studying. There’s no hidden motive. She really is just a scared little girl who honestly forgot to complete her assignment.

"Maybe you wouldn't be so small if you didn't go to the bathroom so much."

Note how the teacher still punishes her. She isn’t let off the hook, and he only gives those who didn’t finish their assignments a simple bonk on the head with a rolled-up paper. But look at his expression. He feels bad about it. This isn’t one of the trouble-making students, or one who consistently doesn’t put in the effort. He knows this. He comes off as a hard-ass right before that clip starts, but his cold exterior is melted by a sincere apology from a little girl(who also happens to plead for mercy in an adorable way without even realizing it). There’s nothing dishonest or conniving about it. As a little girl who’s only been in High School for 2 days, she doesn’t know what a punishment amounts to there yet. She’s sorry, she gets a bonk in the head, the scene cuts to her baking a cake. What else do you want? Hell, that’s a lot more than most kids shows in North America offer.

Even when she's in horrible pain, she's adorable.

What really brings home this character for me is the voice. How in the hell do the Japanese manage to wring out that kind of childlike squeal, and not only hit all of the right notes, but do so without coming off as irritating as real children? Combined with the saccharine imagery, it amounts to a character that generated more stupid grins, chuckles and bouts of genuine(mad) laughter from me than maybe any other fictional character. And on top of all that, she’s a heart-warming and unique personality with an able-bodied script to back her up.

I think this is what the Japanese dictionary points to for "kawaii"

Also, she has a doggy. That she sometimes RIDES because she’s SO LWITTLE. Which is awesome.

ADVENTURE-TIME!!

Don’t think I’m even close to finished talking about this character, or this show. There’s still lots more long-winded fan-wankery on the way. =D

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Electronic Gaming Monthly, the oldest running video game magazine in America, has been… what’s the trade-back magazine word for “canceled“? (Not that that magazine hasn’t been dead to me since Jeanne Kim left and they changed to that horrid new layout, but still)

It wasn’t anything fantastic, but it was a solid and enjoyable read for my youthful days. I learned wit and creative ways of communicating criticism from EGM. So, you could say my blog and comic are pretty much their fault.

I’ve felt the game magazines have been doomed for a while now, but I think EGM in particular could have at least stalled its demise. But I bought an issue of theirs last year, and the writing and look of the magazine was just awful compared to their glory days. Just more of the same fan-sturbation for “hyped” titles that just so happen to also have advertising space, and an excessive, embarrassing dedication to giant screenshots. If I wanted that, I’d read fucking GamePro.

I remember when they had the “Review Crew”, a group of likeable, interesting personalities, who all sounded a little different in their reviews and never buckled under peer-pressure to just give a game the same treatment everyone else was giving it. I can recall several occasions of a game losing those overall score-based Silver, Gold, Platinum, etc. “awards”, because one person just couldn’t share the enthusiasm for a game that the other reviewers had. You will never, ever see that kind of honesty at Gamespot or IGN.

That’s another thing: Multiple people reviewed the same game, to give multiple view-points of the same product. If they all agreed, they instinctively knew how to each say something different while saying the same thing: That Game X either is worth your money or is not. It was kind of like Famitsu, except less retarded.

You had Dan “Shoe” Hsu, Crispin Boyer, Greg Sewart, Jeanne Kim, and a lot of other neat people whose names I’ve forgotten because I’m too lazy to get up and grab an old issue. And they all felt like journalists and human beings, not merely hand-puppets for Eidos and Ubisoft. Those names may be foreign(maybe even alien) to the Digg.com spam-bots who comprise my total readership, but I’ve got a few fond memories of that crew(and a hell of a lot of back issues of EGM archived in my bedroom). And even when I didn’t agree with them, it still felt like I could trust them and their opinions(ok, except for Sushi-X, but that was just a made-up character with a revolving-door writing team they made to make the magazine more interesting). I miss that. I miss when people treated games seriously, but still managed to wring some fun out of it.

That’s the thing: Roger Ebert they were not, but that’s partly what made them so fun to read. You weren’t just reading about games, you were reading about wacky, down-to-earth Reviewers.

So farewell, to the once-greatest video game magazine. You had a good run, right up until you wanted to be a Sears Catalogue for games like everyone else. You were The Simpsons of your time, except if someone had the good sense to cancel The Simpsons before the 200th season.

(Okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair. EGM never got as bad as a newer Simpsons episode.)

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Today’s article is about “Sakaki”. She is both feared and respected by those around her, and for the first half of the series sits alone in the corner of the classroom, staring out the window. She comes off as cool and collected, perhaps even more mature than the other girls.

She also has an affection for small animals, even when said animals are only out to destroy her for some reason. Time and again, even though she knows she’ll just get bitten, she can’t resist trying to pet something so adorable.

OM NOM NOM NOM

She’s not hard on the eyes either. Numerous references are made to her large breasts, tall stature, athletic build and other unobjectionable features. When the girls are in a crowded new year’s celebration, Tomo remarks that to avoid getting lost, they “…should all meet up at the Sakaki-san!“, as if she’s a monument. She, however, is embarrassed whenever mention is made of this.

She admits later in the program’s run that she likes cute things because she’s never thought of herself as being “cute”. At first, I thought her reaction to her fortunate appearance was unrealistic. “Oh no, you have big breasts, a pretty face, a modicum of intelligence AND talent?” I thought, mockingly. “You poor thing.”

Then I remembered an old King of the Hill episode, where Bobby’s friend Joseph appears twice as tall as he did in his last appearance on the show. His face is riddled with acne and he now has a new voice actor, with a deeper voice. He’s unable to answer Bobby when he asks if it happened overnight, or was more gradual. He honestly doesn’t know. Maybe this girl didn’t always look the way she does either. Maybe it happened without warning to her too, and now she has to get adjusted to being inside a new form of herself. Puberty has a way of sneaking up on us like that, and we’re left forced to switch up established game plans.

And it was Jerry Holkins who wrote:

“I’ve never known a single person whose body was not a source of psychological torment, indeed, it can be seen as the sole conduit of all human suffering. Even in its most pristine condition, the body is a prison.”

I've always liked this picture, for some reason.

Although she gradually becomes one of the main “group” of six main characters, the only one I’ve noticed who initially tries to reach out to her is “Chiyo”, the ridiculously adorable prodigy child. Everyone else either steered clear of her or saw her as a subject of worship, too afraid to get involved in her life for fear that she’ll reject them. Perhaps because Chiyo is a newer addition to the school, as well as being much younger than the other girls, she is outside the social stigmas that would prevent this person from having a healthy friendship or two. She got around those defenses before anyone could tell her they were there.

As the series continues, she is faced with the increasingly difficult compulsion to hide and suppress the fact that she is obsessed with cute imagery and cats. The latter of which has been barred from her life due to her parents allergies. Is she afraid of what people will think? I still haven’t figured this one out. It’s embarrassing for her, but why? Eventually she has no problem with being caught reading magazines with pictures of kittens and other cute imagery. Perhaps at that point she’s asking why she ever felt embarrassed about it as well.

One of the reasons why she connects with Chiyo is due to her infectious cuteness. She also has a friendly, almost stone-like pet dog, which Sakaki will make any excuse to spend time with. This has on more than one occasion made me wonder if Sakaki’s friendship with Chiyo is more than superficial. I mean, will they still be friends when the dog has passed on and Chiyo is no longer a cuddlesome little girl? We see in some episodes genuine acts of kindness on Sakaki’s part for her tiny friend, and vice-versa. I think it’s about something more than appearances. These are two people who are looking out for each other. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about there…

Although she does let her obsession with cute imagery get in the way sometimes. She overhears Chiyo talking about a book with panda pictures she plans to buy, and notes that their popularity may assure that it is sold out by the time she gets to the store. Sakaki is then seen walking swiftly through the halls to the exit, at first discretely, then in a mad dash. She’s out to acquire that book before Chiyo can.

That is one patient little girl and dog. This is in the same shot as the last picture, but AFTER a time-lapse!

Most of the characters are pretty easy to read, but Sakaki is still a bit of a mystery to me. That’s not a bad thing either, although I hoped they hadn’t waited until very close to the end of the series to explore her a bit further. There are 3 episodes midway through the show, in a row, that are about her addiction to cuteness and struggle to hide it. It got a bit tiresome to have that squeezed into 3 episodes, without really advancing her as a character. Those episodes just kill time. I almost got tired of Sakaki, which is why I’m really glad that a bone is finally thrown her way in the last few episodes. I’ll have more on that later.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Of the 4 main contributors to I-Mockery, my least favourite is Dr. Boogie. Not because he’s a bad writer, or unfunny. He’s just the least interesting. His writing never really leaves an impression on me the same way Rog, Protoclown and (the magnificent) Max Burbank’s articles do. He’s not bad at what he does, he’s just… there.

That is starting to change, however. Here’s an excerpt from his article “Turn Your Brain Off“:

When I see attractive people saying stupid, boring things in hour-long blocks with commercial breaks every five minutes, I wonder if I shouldn’t be doing some vacuuming instead.

That had a very -Ebert- vibe to it. And here’s a line from his review of an NES game called “Metal Storm”:

The plot is… ah, who cares.

I’m keeping my eye on him from now on…

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Reading Jim Emerson go on and on and on(and ON, Jesus, let it go!) about how The Dark Knight is a “bad movie” is like the Family Guy clip where Peter tells his family he “didn’t care for The Godfather”. And then he claims what he hates the most is the fans(whom the movie is not responsible for) failing to explain why they love the movie in contrast to him.

Even though most of his blog comments are a parade of people doing exactly that, let’s pretend that we exist in some crazy, alternate universe where that last tidbit isn’t true.

Hey Jim, you know who did a good job at explaining why this is effective cinematic entertainment? The guy who’s website you’re the editor for.

You know who else did a good job explaining what makes this movie work? A man who’s not willing to let stupid fans cloud his judgment.

I’m sick of his bellyaching. He wants someone to explain something specific about why The Dark Knight is better than he makes it out to be? Allow me. Thinking on what to start things off with, I see a dizzying flash of scenes, exchanges of dialogue and camera shots that tickled me in some way. Now to pin a few of those suckers down and elaborate.

[It should go without saying that spoilers this way lie. Not that any of you haven't seen The Dark Knight.]

===========

I notice something else in this movie every time I watch it. Some visual detail or some undiscovered little line of dialogue that helps glue everything together, that the sometimes hectic pace of the screenplay allowed me to miss on the first viewing. But I don’t hold it against the film itself. I was so mesmerized by the performances that I could forgive not fully understanding everything the first time. I got the gist of it enough to keep up, but now, every time I watch this movie, it makes more and more sense.

(For example: at first I thought Bruce Wayne/Batman changed his mind halfway to saving Rachel Dawes and decided the city would need Harvey to live on. Needs of the many. Seeing the movie again, I see now that the Joker lied to them. He cruelly gives them reversed directions, so that even if one of them got to Rachel or Harvey in time, they would discover the person they didn’t want to save, and it would be too late to change their decision at that point. He effectively ensured that even if they won, they’d lose.)

—–

The Bank Robbery. I didn’t think much of it at first, thinking it was just there to establish that The Joker is a crazy guy. Then I thought about why he went face-to-face with the mobsters he ripped off. He robbed the bank to show them that he’s capable of getting things done, no matter the odds or the cost. And when he inexplicably has the posse of younger goons, it occurs to me that he probably bought their loyalty with the money he stole earlier.

—–

When Harvey Dent is “interrogating” the Joker’s accomplice with the Rachel Dawes nameplate(effectively saying she’s the next target), he flips a coin to decide whether or not to shoot him. This is before I was aware that he uses a double-headed coin. At first, I thought it was just because he’s Two-Face, and that’s what he does in the comics.

But when I saw the movie again, knowing it was a two-headed coin, it becomes clear that he’s not Two-Face there. He’s Harvey Dent. There is a lot of anger boiling under the surface, he knows that they’re going to try and kill someone he cares very deeply about.

But it’s a two-headed coin, and the man tied down will only die if it came up as “tails”. No matter how furious he is with the scum of the city threatening him and his lover, he would never have killed him. He just wanted him to talk.

—–

The Ferry scene. I love the way this is set up. Two boats, one with civilians, one with convicts. Both are rigged with explosives, but each ferry has the other’s detonator. They have only a few minutes to decide whether to blow the other vessel to bits, and if neither makes a move by midnight, both ferries will be detonated by The Joker(although I wouldn’t exactly trust his word after the Dawes/Dent incident).

This is fun. It allows the audience to come up with their own opinion on what they would do. It almost feels like you’re on both of those ferries. A lot of characters on the civilian side got their say, with conflicting opinions that I’m sure reflect at least some of the audiences’ beliefs.

But what really surprised me(which never happens for me with movies anymore), is what the big, black, evil-looking convict does when he convinces the warden to give him the detonator. I never saw that coming, and his decision effectively leaves the choice of mass-murder up to the innocent civilians. It’s the Hitchcock Rule of Suspense taken to the extreme. We see the bombs, but the LACK of an explosion is what makes this scene work. That, and allowing us to see and understand the people trapped in this impossible moral dilemma.

I can’t say if it’s realistic or not, but I think it’s better than “realistic”. I’m sure we’d all say we’d just detonate the convict boat. Seems like the logical thing to do, if The Joker is good on his promise to let the surviving ferry go. But it’s not that easy. How many of us can say we’ve ever been in a situation like that? You do not know what you would do if you had that detonator in the palm of your hands, and neither do I. Neither did those ferry passengers.

—–

I love how the sound is drowned out when the Joker escapes into the night from the police station, and it cuts to Alfred opening and reading Rachel’s letter. Sucks the air right out of you.

—–

The spinning camera when The Joker imparts his second origin story on Rachel at the fund-raiser. I’m not sure why I like that, but it adds something, I think.

—–

The multiple origin stories the Joker gives to his victims. Anyone else would stick with one and try to make the case that he was once human, albeit a bad one at that. This is a creature evolved beyond an excuse for his actions and behaviour. I think he really does have deep-rooted father issues, but I don’t think he lets anyone know the true extent of that. He gives them a story because they need to make sense of himself.

This goes hand-in-hand with his remarks later on that “Nobody panics if everything goes ‘according to plan’, even if the plan is HORRIFYING.”

—–

And since the truth behind his origin story is questioned, this means it’s no longer just Heath Ledger acting as The Joker. This is Heath acting as The Joker, acting to convince people that he was once a good guy, transformed into what he is the same way Harvey Two-Face was “born”. If I hadn’t seen his conversation with Gambol in an earlier scene, if I were at that fund-raiser, I’d have believed it. I think this is a man who translates his own pain into others’, regardless of where that pain comes from. But when he says “She can’t stand the sight of me!“, I believed him, even though I knew I shouldn’t have.

—–

At that point, I swear I could -smell- The Joker. And he smells like rotting cabbage. There are a lot of peculiar odours in a movie theatre, but I think that one is a result of how the film imagines this character, and not merely the fault of a filthy audience. That’s what my brain deduces him to smell like, apparently.

—–

Harvey Two-Face. Not “Two-Face”, the mob-boss with two personalities. But rather a good man whose life has been completely and utterly ruined. I knew he would become Two-Face. I knew beforehand that he would fall. But his confrontation with Batman and Gordon at the end is just an incomprehensibly marvelous sight. Not since Michael Douglas’ character in “Falling Down” have I ever objected so much to a man’s actions, yet grieved for him and the recent events of his life. The strongest protagonist in this movie is reduced to flipping a coin to decide whether or not an innocent family will die. This is a man in incredible pain trying to scavenge justice through injustice.

Not even another person who understands pain better than him is able to reach him through reason. At least Bruce Wayne had a lifetime to get adjusted to scars that will always haunt him. Harvey has had to endure all of that in a matter of hours, and I imagine refusing painkillers and skin-grafts just multiplies that furious anguish until he makes the decisions he does in the last half-hour. And Ekhart pulls off a stunning performance, perfectly embodying the frightening, seething resentment this character’s life has become.

—–

The Magic Trick.

—–

The hospital detonation scene. Even Jim liked this one. I don’t know if this is all one take, but the way the camera follows The Joker, the way he walks away from the crumbling building, and his reaction when he notices one of the bombs isn’t going off is a treasure of modern-day cinema. Something about this shot feels miraculous, something that could never ever happen again, let alone any better than it is.

—–

The way how, even when there isn’t even a mention or nod to The Joker, he haunts every single frame. You really believe he’s there, influencing every move towards oblivion. Maybe this owes something to the untimely passing of a certain Australian actor, but either or, you can sense his presence in every scene, and the musical “cue” that he’s about to make another appearance is the stuff of nightmares. Even the soundtrack fears him.

—–

The music. I contend that this movie would be substantially worse if it weren’t for the score provided by Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, and apparently a bunch of other people. Can you imagine the last scene with Harvey Two-Face, or the meeting between the mobsters with the Danny Elfman Batman music? Music is there in movies to lift a moment into the depths of heaven, or the screaming peaks of Hell.

—–

Jim Gordon. My favourite character here. A couple of days after we first saw TDK, my friend was asking me who, “…besides The Joker”, my favourite character was. I thought it over, and while I came close to saying Harvey, I kept thinking about Gary Oldman’s portrayal as the police commissioner. Before I could answer this, he told me(paraphrased): “For me, it was Gordon. I mean, I don’t know if you remember the cartoons and stuff, but he was always a…”. He thought for a moment, and came up with the best description I’ve heard of this character pre-Nolan: “A wiener.”

It’s weird. He has the least interesting lines in the script. He’s not a strong man, either. He does the absolute best he can with very little, and ultimately fails. Although he does require Batman’s assistance, he doesn’t rely on him for everything and they don’t see eye-to-eye on every decision. And yet I like him more than any other non-Joker character.

When he quickly makes the order to try and control the Joker’s threats to blow up a hospital, there is real fear in his voice. But not so much that it weakens him. If anything, he is the most relatable character, a down-to-earth human being surrounded by superheroes and supervillains. Here he is a pillar of sanity struggling to stand against the crashing waves. Gary Oldman took an otherwise dorky, superfluous character and made him remarkable and honest. He fulfills a thankless role in maintaining peace in Gotham, and he’s a great example of how The Dark Knight is about the failure of good men. Does it get any more noir than that?

—–

The script!

Two-Face: It’s not about what I want! It’s about what’s FAIR!

Joker: Do I really look like a guy with a plan?

Joker: Look at what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets.

Joker: Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.

Natasha: How could you want to raise children in a city like this?
Bruce: [jokingly defensive] Hey! I grew up in Gotham, and I turned out all right.
Harvey: Is Wayne Manor in the city limits?

Joker: Don’t talk like one of them, you’re not! Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak–like me! They need you right now. When they don’t… they’ll cast you out. Like a leper! See, their morals, their code: it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these, uh… these civilized people, they’ll eat each other.

Joker: You have nothing–nothing to threaten me with, nothing to do with all your strength!

Bruce Wayne: That bandit in the forest in Burma…did you catch him?
Alfred: Yes.
Bruce Wayne: How?
Alfred: We burned the forest down.

Yes, this movie has flaws. I remember my friend shaking his head at the Joker’s “getaway” in the bank scene. I seriously doubt that the cop cars would fail to notice the school bus without any kids, covered in building debris and being driven by a crazy clown. And I hate Harvey’s line about “living long enough to become the villain.” Not only does it make very little sense when taken literally(how many octegenarians are super-villains?), it would’ve been more subtle if Christopher Nolan came into the scene with a neon light that said: “He becomes Two-Face later!“. And Batman was probably the worst part of this movie, thanks to his voice being nigh unintelligible(I blame the lack of nose-holes in his new cowl).

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But really, what kind of lunacy is required to take all of that(and more), and then somehow come to the conclusion that this film is tawdry?

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~A.H.