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.