The Dark Knight, round 3.

"Fevered fans pushed The Dark Knight the sixth of the Warner Brothers series of Batman movies, to record three-day ticket sales of $155.3 million over the weekend, shoring up what so far had been a wobbly year at the box office." Michael Cieply reports for the New York Times, while, at Movie City News, Leonard Klady sorts through the numbers and Variety's Pamela McClintock notes that the final tally has been revised - upwards.

"As happens only once every decade or so, the entire moviegoing population of America became welded into a single breathless entity, and the result was a pop event on the order of the Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan," blogs the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "Go ahead and scoff at the analogy, boomers, but one of the kids [he's met] likened the opening of Dark Knight to the JFK assassination and the Challenger disaster as quintessential where-were-you defining moments of his generation. That says much, about both this movie and the callowness of smart young men - the correct analogy is to Titanic or the final installment of The Lord of the Rings - but a pop event has always created its own sense of necessary immensity."

Updated through 7/27.

"Now you see it, now you don't," writes Keith Uhlich at the House Next Door. "That about encapsulates the depths of feeling and artistry in The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan and company's sordid exercise in avert-your-eyes sadism, a work at best inelegant and at worst inept. The film would have us believe it's about dualities and polarities, the so-called Dark Knight of Gotham (Christian Bale as billionaire Bruce Wayne and vigilante alter-ego Batman) compared and contrasted with White Knight—soon-to-be literally two-faced—Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), both of them joined in messily chaotic battle with the facially-scarred villain known as The Joker, whose mid-film 'You complete me' declaration to Batman is less Jerry Maguire-jest than Matrix-like pseudo-philosophy." Since that went up on Saturday, a storm of comments has been battering the House.

"No formula exists to determine the greatest living American filmmaker," writes Mike D'Angelo for Esquire. "The thing about Christopher Nolan (who's as much British as American - but sue me, so was Hitchcock) is that he doesn't clonk you over the head with his genius."

"[Heath] Ledger, for my liking, doesn't quite have the ticcy, nervy danger on screen that would have made his Joker an outstanding piece of cinematic devilment," write the Observer's Jason Solomons.

Jesse Hassenger goes spoilerific at the L Magazine.

"If director Christopher Nolan's first Batman film, the origin story Batman Begins, took as its model the famously dark Frank Miller stories of the mid-80s, and especially Batman: Year One, this new installment takes off from Alan Moore's even nastier The Killing Joke," notes Ed Howard. "Miller's Batman may have launched the darker, grittier take on the bat-eared crimefighter, but Moore's slightly later short story considerably ups the ante, positing a Joker who only wants to prove that anyone can be driven to madness, and a Batman who exists as a moral flipside to this evil clown, only a few short steps from the same fate."

Earlier: Rounds 1 and 2.

Updates: "Part of the problem with The Dark Knight for the critical cast of mind is the fact that it is such a multifaceted film that criticisms and praise alike get swallowed up into its richly textured abundance of character, incident, politics, and pointed set design," writes DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "Though its two-and-a-half hours does make up a unified whole, with a couple of digressive longheurs along the way, the film does lend itself to atomization, creating handy parcel with which the critic may make salient points sometimes relevant to the whole. In fact, there are at least 11 The Dark Knights, each self-contained units lending themselves to in-depth treatment." A dozen are noted.

Via Matt Dentler, Variety's Phil Gallo talks with Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard about their score: "Batman gets two notes. The Joker, only one. It's a radical concept for a film score, a technique more likely to be found in a Wagner opera. Those notes do not sit alone or on top of a brash comicbook score either. This is a score inspired by minimalism, repeated motifs that echo the work of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass."

Updates, 7/22: "This is a summer tent-pole movie that plays to the masochistic instincts of cinemagoers fretting over their own futures," writes Geoffrey Macnab. "All the signs are that audiences are basking in that sinking feeling and sense of trepidation the film gleefully induces." Also in the Independent: Mark Hughes reports on last night's premiere in London; a FAQ on Batman's enduring appeal; John Walsh asks, "why did American comics differ so sharply from British ones?"; and Guy Adams wonders, "Would Batman still be a blockbuster if Heath Ledger had lived?"

"If you think this summer has been jammed with superhero movies, you ain't seen nothin' yet," warns the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein.

"Dear Film Critics," begins Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "Really, everyone? Really? I know how this is going to come off to those of you who are still quivering under its dark, moody spell, but someone has to do it." The Dark Knight is "just as long-winded, shapeless, formulaic, and deadening as the most generic big-budget buffoonery out there. You can call me a snob if you want to, go right ahead. I'm simply calling the movie out for what it is: a glossy, pseudo-'deep' work of mass consumer-friendly torture porn."

"A catch-22: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight demands, in a mean, raspy voice, to be taken more seriously than your average comic book movie," writes Adam Nayman in Reverse Shot. "But when one endeavors to do just that - to analyze its loudly explicated themes of duality and ethical impasse; to parse the implications of having its villain be referred to and self-identify as a 'terrorist'; to consider the use of invasive surveillance technology as a post–Patriot Act plot point - one is reprimanded for bullying a defenseless Pop object. Hey, guys, why so serious?"

Updates, 7/23: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir points to the discussion going on at Dave Kehr's place, "an intriguing back-and-forth among defenders and detractors of The Dark Knight - as well as a fascinating discussion of the role and limits of film criticism - with nary a nasty epithet in sight. Is the picture, as one poster proposes, a complex tragedy 'about moral ambivalence and the impossibility of justice in America at this moment'? Or does it tell us we 'shouldn't question those who operate outside of what we consider acceptable codes of morality, but rather just shut up and trust the hero'?"

"What kind of world would this be had we taken Batman so seriously since 1939?" asks John McElwee. "Could we have won a World War with such conflicted role models as super-heroes have become?"

"Personally, I understand the hype that surrounds just about any big Hollywood release as being the work of masterful publicity machinations which seeps into the blood of those prepared to dig the scene - that's business as usual," offers Dennis Cozzalio. "But there's something different going on here, and fan reactions to dissenting views like Edelstein's and Uhlich's often seem more like Joker-esque dementia than protectiveness over a pet film."

Jürgen Fauth defends his nerd cred: "I now offer a comparison of George Lucas's tragically misunderstood pop masterpiece and the absurdly overpraised muddle for which Christopher Nolan is now treated as the second coming of Alfred Hitchcock." It's Revenge of the Sith vs The Dark Knight.

James Rocchi: "[A]fter sitting down with The Prestige, I think I get what [David] Fear was saying about Nolan's body of work as a whole; The Prestige suggests Nolan's capable of a lot more than the bat-clad, bomb-bursting bullet-filled action of The Dark Knight."

"Eckhart suddenly finds himself the flag-bearer for the UK release of this record-breaking blockbuster ($158m and counting), now that one of the movie's two stars is helping police with their enquiries, and the other one is reachable only by ouija board." Ryan Gilbey talks with him for the Guardian.

IFC's Matt Singer offers a "Visual History" of Gotham City.

Updates, 7/24: "I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that Iron Man, Hancock and Dark Knight together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.... Is it just me, or is the strain starting to show?"

"Nolan reveals an ambition unseen not only in most comic book adaptations but in most movies, period," writes Andrew Bemis. "It feels like his entire career has been building to this, as he reveals himself to be one of the great cinematic storytellers, and The Dark Knight an unqualified masterpiece."

"[O]ne thing all The Dark Knight's fanatics have in common is profound enthusiasm," writes Ariel Leve in the Guardian. "I envy that. I wish I cared about something as much as they care about Batman."

Vue Weekly's David Berry and Josef Braun have a quick chat.

"However high Nolan might pile on the gravity, however long he might stretch out the agony, the comic-book iconography inevitably simplifies and trivializes the moral debate: Can you fight fair when you fight terrorism?" Duncan Shepherd in the San Diego Reader: "Somehow bat ears and clown makeup ill become a crisis of conscience. The truth is that Nolan's lack of faith in the superhero of olden days - the White Knight - goes hand in glove with a larger lack of faith in the fairy-tale form. He can't trust it to convey its import (in spite of all the scholarly efforts of Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, et al) without an additive of grand-operatic bombast. His reformer's zeal amounts to just another aspect of his pretentiousness."

Updates, 7/25: The Dark Knight hits the UK: Peter Bradshaw (Guardian), Dave Calhoun (Time Out), James Christopher (Times), Ryan Gilbey (New Statesman), Derek Malcolm (Evening Standard), Anthony Quinn (Independent) and Sukhdev Sandhu (Telegraph).

The WSWS's David Walsh finds it "a good nor a serious film. It is ill-conceived and poorly done, overlong, confusing and emotionally muddy."

Gill Pringle profiles Maggie Gyllenhaal for the Independent.

Updates, 7/26: "It's time, I'm afraid, to let loose the dogs of apocalyptic cultural complaint, this time upon the throat of The Dark Knight, which I was coerced into finally seeing despite my official moratorium on voluntarily watching superhero movies, or any film in which someone puts on a mask or has 'special powers,' the latter of which is all by itself a dead giveaway, as a narrative device, to the film-culture mess we find ourselves in," sighs Michael Atkinson. "The Dark Knight epitomizes the problem specifically not by simply being a Caped Crusader trifle masquerading as Paradise Lost, but because it failed to do the simplest things movies have always done: tell a fucking story."

"The Dark Knight is middling as a summer blockbuster, zero as art, and more than a bit alarming as a phenomenon," argues Fernando F Croce.

At Vinyl Is Heavy, Jennifer Stewart and Ryland Walker Knight begin a longish conversation via email.

You'll have heard about this: here's William Triplett's take at Wilshire & Washington: "An op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal is either brilliant satire (New Yorker cover artists, take note) or the most breathtakingly silly form of wish-fulfillment one is ever likely to find in those otherwise august pages."

Update, 7/27: First thing Pacze Moj does is issue a warning: "The following post is long, messy, and full of overblown, half-baked ideas that I just felt like writing down. In other words, it's very much like the film it's describing."

Posted by dwhudson at July 21, 2008 9:10 AM