Slim and I saw the new Batman movie at the "local" IMAX — $12.50/ticket, plus $4 in gas. It was a good comic-book movie, and a decent enough summer-blockbuster movie, but I don't understand the inordinate fuss being made about it, to the point that "The Dark Knight" has supplanted "The Godfather" as the #1 rated movie of all time on IMDB.

(Spoilers be here.)

Ok, we'll grant that Heath Ledger is very good as the Joker, and puts Nicholson's take to shame. (I haven't seen anyone note that the Joker's knifework is ironically reminiscent of Nicholson's fate in Chinatown.) I like that the backstory is taken for granted, and that the Joker has fun making up new backstories throughout the movie. I like that the Joker is acknowledged to be irrational, which solves why his crimes are irrational without retconning. It's a frightening comic book villain, filling the screen with a Tarantino-esque menace in a way that the cartoon villains in Iron Man or Spider-Man did not. Indeed, it's the scariest movie villain since... well, since November and Javier Bardem's Anton Chigurh.

And that's the thing. There's a lot that's good here, but nothing groundbreaking, and a lot that is just passable. Threads of the plot just disappear. (A big to-do is made when Eric Roberts's character betrays the Joker's location to police, who get ready to storm the meeting he's holding with other mob bosses—and nothing comes of it.) Twice Batman falls from great heights, lands on his back, and walks away from the force—as does a victim who lands on him. Someone else falls four floors and dies. A bad guy, unbelted in the back seat, kills a driver, causing an automobile to crash and flip. The killer shows up a few scenes later unharmed; we never learn what happened to his fellow passenger. Bruce Wayne taps into the entire cell-phone network with a ludicrous sonar device. Two Joker schemes require ludicrously impeccable timing and coincidences to work.

In terms of the aesthetics, Nolan's Gotham is very plainly Chicago in every shot. I love Chicago, but its recognizable landmarks take one out of the illusion and the result doesn't live up to the magic of Burton's Gotham or even the Gotham of Batman Begins. (A scene talking about the Joker's terrorist threat on "bridges and tunnels" of Gotham is followed by a wince-inducing shot of police searching the tiny little bridges off of Wacker over the Chicago River--they clearly left Chicago to film a ferry sequence, why not film a real bridge?) Most of the action sequences are filmed in a blur of quick cuts making it impossible to follow (or really care) what's going on; so much for the elaborate choreography showing off Christian Bale's training. The Batmobile is still an ugly Bat-tank that probably causes more damage to innocents than it prevents. Bale is forced to talk in a monotonic rasp when wearing the cowl, and the dialogue is goofy.

Fun movie; enjoyable movie; yes. All-time great movie? No. Not even clear to me that it surpasses The Incredibles, X2, Spider-Man, or Robo-Cop as a superhero movie.

Separately, it's not clear to me that the IMAX was worth the extra effort (big commute plus 30 minutes of standing in line--and we were pretty far in the back of the line) and the loss of trailers. Any additional wow from the six-story screen was offset by the big distracting piece of dust on an uncleaned lens.

I did a very good job of keeping myself ignorant about the Hancock movie, my knowledge coming solely from the excellent and funny trailer that sold me on the high concept of Will Smith as a dissolute Superman and Jason Bateman as the pr agent who tries to revive his bad public image. The trailer didn't even mention the other big star in the movie, who is a favorite of mine, and the sudden twist in the middle of the movie took me completely by surprise. It's been a long time since I've been that pleasantly surprised in a movie (mostly my own fault from reading too much entertainment press), so I wish I could've liked the movie more than I did, but the discordant pieces don't ever gel, and the movie mostly falls apart after a twist that should have made it much more interesting.

Bateman is very funny, the acting of the three leads is good (though the supporting cast doesn't provide a lot of support, and one wants to throttle every child actor who appears in the movie), the funny scenes from the trailer are funny, but not much else works. The directing and camerawork are appalling, two big set-piece action sequences in the middle and end of the movie don't work in the slightest, the writing was mediocre, and someone from the studio really should have done something about the weird and sudden tone-shifts and inconsistent characterization. It doesn't help that the main villain never read the Evil Overlord list. The movie never decides whether it's dark or light, and there's a racial dynamic that's never addressed. Slim complained about weird musical choices, too.

A quick Google search reveals that this was originally written as a very dark movie that got punched up to be more of a kids' movie, but the result kind of gets stuck in the middle without satisfying either goal. The movie is a very hard PG-13, and not appropriate for kids; apparently, the first two cuts were rated R. The seams painfully show where edits were made to satisfy the ratings board, but that really should have been anticipated much sooner and rewritten so the movie isn't standing on the PG-13/R line.

All of this is frustrating, because this easily could have been a much better movie if the script had been a bit more polished and if the director had been less intrusive.

OK, this is just awesome. Someone spent a long time on that. Don't miss the disclaimers and waivers and privacy policy.

With absolutely no evidence to back this up, I strongly suspect that an earlier draft of "Wall-E" had a much, much, darker ending, and that that ending got focus-tested and Disneyized out of the movie.

I can't blame them: the charming ending they have versus the Strangelovian ending I imagine it originally having probably makes a $200-million difference not including the merchandising and theme-park possibilities. But rewrite the last ten minutes to be more internally consistent with the satiric message of the movie, and it would be one of my all-time favorites. That said, even with the nod to commercialism, it's one of the best movies I've seen this year, was quite entertaining and even moving. I saw nods to bits of Star Wars, Titanic, Planet of the Apes, Silent Running, 2001, Matrix, Sleeping Beauty, City Lights, Terry Gilliam—and a lot of Idiocracy. Thumbs up. I'd be curious what my readers think of my theory of the ending.

Updating my summer movie list:

• Iron-Man very very good, perhaps best comic-book movie ever (aside from the questionable legal machinations over corporate control);


• Indiana Jones was teh suck;


• I may be willing to give the Hulk movie a shot if it gets good reviews;


• Same with Hellboy II;


• Now that I know Robert Smigel wrote it (warning: link has far too many spoilers) with Judd Apatow, I'm intrigued by the "Zohan" Sandler vehicle.

Brawndo!, now being advertised. And it's greener than Green River, which was pretty darn green when my Easterbrook co-clerk and I tracked down a couple of bottles at the old Heaven on Seven in Chicago.

(Have I mentioned how awesome Idiocracy is?)

May 22 - Indiana Jones
June 20 - Get Smart
July 2 - Hancock
July 18 - The Dark Knight
August 8 - Pineapple Express

Maybe?
May 2 - Iron Man
June 27 - Wall-E
July 25 - Step-Brothers
August 15 - Tropic Thunder
August 29 - Barcelona

We're watching the beginning of Double Indemnity.

Slim: Is he shot?
Me: What? In the shoulder? He's holding his arm funny. Maybe. It's not colorized, so I can't tell.
Slim: There isn't a lot of blood.
Me: It was 1944. Less blood then. There was wartime rationing.

Via MM, another complaint about King of Kong's Moore-esque editing.

Isn't it remarkable how Michael Kamen's remix of "Brazil" is still used in several movie ads every year more than twenty years since he composed the score? It's a shame, because it turns that spectacular Terry Gilliam tracking shot in the Ministry of Information (okay, not really a tracking shot, because there are two or three cuts in there to hide how small the set was) into a cliche because we're so sick of the music.

If you're willing to buy into the construct "What would 'Godzilla' seem like in the first-person perspective of the average man-on-the-street?", the framing device of the entire movie being shot by the handheld video of that person (including the silly functioning-cellphone, anachronistic tape-over and infinite-battery continuity issues), don't mind the occasional scene where the actors are looking up at the sky in different directions, and are willing to go for the roller-coaster ride without worrying too much about the implausible physics and biophysics, then you'll agree with Tyler Cowen that Cloverfield is a "remarkable cinematic event." If you aren't willing to buy into that, can't tolerate ambiguity in movies or get seasick without a Steadicam, you'll be very unhappy with the movie. It's a smart-and-subtle dumb movie that I like more the more I think about it, though I found the unspoken 9-11 references discomfiting when I was watching it.

Some reviewers complain about how unrealistic it is that Hud doesn't stop filming, but (1) it's sixty minutes of tape in a seven-hour experience--because of the lack of omniscient perspective, we don't see when he's not filming; and (2) I didn't have a problem with it, because I obsessively watched every 9-11 videotape and photo album put on the web and saw plenty where one is wondering why the camera is still running. Hud is adequately established early in the movie as the sort of clueless galoot who'd keep filming when it makes no sense to do so, and we're necessarily seeing the filming only because someone didn't turn off the camera.

When are you willing to suspend disbelief and immerse oneself in the movie? I was able to do so for "Cloverfield" and "Children of Men." For "Live Free or Die Hard," I shook my head repeatedly, but enjoyed the ride. For the trio of trilogy sequels "The Bourne Ultimatum," "Oceans 13," and "Spider-Man 3," I was just utterly annoyed.