So I finally saw The Dark Knight on the IMAX yesterday. I was blown away by the IMAX sequences. I forgot just how good 70mm film can look. This isn’t necessarily a review of the new Batman movie, you’ve probably already seen it anyways. If you haven’t seen it yet because you’ve been in the hospital or something then you’d better stop reading because I’m going to unleash some spoilers.

After I saw The Dark Knight the first time I tried to convince myself that it was the best comic themed movie ever. Batman is my favorite comic book character, and I would argue the most important comic character in history. Unfortunately this new movie must be more closely scrutinized than the rest for that reason.

I was never a Make Mine Marvel kid. I read a little Spiderman and X-Men, but Batman was where it was at. And especially Neal Adam’s Batman. Batman, along with Bo Jackson, and Mr. T were my role models. Batman had the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes, the gadgets of James Bond, the fighting abilities of Bruce Lee plus 100 ninjas, and most importantly an insane thirst for justice. Those are all things that are humanly possible if one works hard enough (except if you’re not blessed with being a billionaire I guess the gadget thing is a problem). Batman wasn’t an alien, he was never in a laboratory experiment gone awry, he wasn’t born with any super powers, he was basically a regular dude.

I loved The Dark Knight. No doubt this is the best film in the Batman series, except for maybe this one. Heath Ledger totally ruled as a Joker I’ve never seen before. The closest I can think of is the Joker from The Killing Joke, which I think the new movie borrowed heavily from since in that story the Joker tries to prove that he can make a certain someone insane from just one bad day. The Harvey Dent/Two Face stuff is great too. I hate to say it, but I think that the movie would’ve been better without Batman. His raspy voice really bothers me. Really, I think I’ll save myself some time and send you to this insightful review by Devin at Chud.com. While I don’t agree completely with him, he does bring up a lot of really good points. One of the biggest problems I had with it was the Joker. Although he steals the show, he’s also very poorly written. How can someone that claims he never has a plan seemingly pull off all these really big schemes with less that a day to work it all out?¹

And what’s with this whole thing with the Government helping Batman to spy on Gotham’s people to catch the Joker? It reminds me of Kingdom Come and Frank Miller’s Batman. It’s these half baked plot points that really bring the movie down for me. You could make a great Batman movie where he turns Gotham into a police state like in Kingdom Come. Instead they just glossed over the whole thing and didn’t even take a firm stance on whether or not it’s a good idea to spy on the population in order to take down evil.

I’ve decided for myself that as far as movies go, Iron Man is the clear winner for best all round comic book movie ever. At least until we get to see Watchmen.

1. In a recent interview with Ian Punnet on Coast to Coast AM, Neal Adams explained that the Joker is an expert planner BECAUSE he’s so psychotic, and while I agree with him on that since he knows the Joker better than most people, I didn’t see anything in the movie to suggest that was the case.

Back in 1981, when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out, three 12 year old kids in Mississippi saw it multiple times and became a little obsessed with it. They decided that it would be a great idea to remake the movie shot for shot during the summer. 7 summers later it was finally finished.

I had first heard about this remake 5 years ago. It was so fantastic it just couldn’t be true. I looked around for bootlegs, but it turned out to be as hard as finding a copy of “The Day the Clown Cried“. Who has that kind of patience? Who has the resources to create something so epic? It was a huge Hollywood production, how could 3 kids possibly do such a thing? A few nights ago I saw the proof. It is very real, and they totally pulled it off, and it was one of the best movie experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

You really should watch the trailer that The Belcourt put together for this screening. It looks awful, the sound is unintelligible half the time, and pretty much everything about the movie is bad. But there is so much magic in it. What these kids accomplished is nothing short of spectacular. It really reminded me why I love movies.

Obviously there are some things they couldn’t film, but they’re few and far between. For instance, they decided not to film the scene where the muscled dude gets destroyed by the airplane propeller because they thought it would “look fake” when they had to blow up a model airplane at the end of the scene. I don’t want to spoil any more of it for you because half the fun is trying to figure out how they’re going to pull off the next big scene.

The director Eric Zala was in attendance and did a Q&A session after the screening. He told us that Daniel Clowes (writer of Ghost World) is currently writing a movie about their experience during the 7 years. He told a lot of great stories about the filming. But perhaps the best story was about Steven Spielberg writing a letter to him after seeing a bootleg of it and telling him that not only did he love it, but it actually inspired him. That would be like if I was a teenager and somehow got to compete against Bo Jackson in the many things he knows and he gave me a high five after I kicked his butt. That was a really bad analogy. Man I really love Bo Jackson.

The movie can only be screened at non-profit venues. So if you want to see it then you’ll have to bug your local non-profit art house theater or college and demand that they show it. We’re lucky that George Lucas hasn’t pitched a fit and sued the pants off the filmmakers. There have been rumors since 2004 that it will one day be released in an Indy box set or something. They were filming a lot at the event, it looked like they were filming for a documentary perhaps. So maybe it will get released, but don’t hold your breath. Also it’s better than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.