December | 2014 | Asian and Entertained

We almost started World War 3 over this?

Posted on December 29, 2014 by babemoby

***SPOILERS AHEAD***

“The Interview” was not at all worth all that trouble. Perhaps the biggest joke is that the Sony almost caused World War 3 over this lazy film. It’s essentially a nothing movie, and considering this is from the group of dudes who came up with the surprisingly self-aware “This is the End,” it even comes as a bit of a let down.

Seth Rogan, playing producer Aaron Rapaport is a bit of a polarizing guy. People either find his throwaway one-liners funny or completely irritating. James Franco, on the other hand plays the talk show host who has an audience with the Supreme Leader himself, Dave Skylark, so over-the-top, it’s as if the guys are trying really hard to convince the audience that this is completely silly and not to be taken seriously at all.

Everybody knows the plot by now. Producer/host duo gets an invitation to interview North Korea’s Kim Jong-un because it’s his favorite show. The CIA contacts the bros to get them to assassinate the supreme leader. And since its Rogan and Franco, you know there’s gonna be lots of stupid jokes about bodily functions and asses. Considering it’s a movie about traveling to an Asian country, you can probably expect come racially insensitive gags.

Surprisingly, the film is bereft of the typical accusing Asian men of having tiny dicks or general impotence, so in a way, that comes as a relief. Instead, there are lots of things making fun of the stereotypical Asian accent and their facial features (Skylark’s same-same but different routine is embarrassing), which are passed off as the dudes being typical buffoonish white Americans. So, instead of the expected frat guy bullshit, it’s more like the stuff you’d have heard in second grade. On the other hand, however, the people in this movie pronounce Kim Jong-un’s name closer to correct than most American’s do. It’s -oon, like baboon, not un, like Uncola.

It’s also incredibly degrading to women in just about every way you can imagine. It casts Lizzy Caplan as a CIA agent whom Aaron accuses of being a honey pot (the practice of using an attractive woman to seduce a man into doing what some sort of higher agency wants). It doesn’t at all go light on fetishizing Asian women, with Diana Bang playing Sook, a North Korean hostess to the Americans, whom Aaron ogles repeatedly and, because Asian women are supposedly enamored with white guys, immediately falls all over him.

But honestly, the majority of the film is mostly pretty harmless. The longest running jokes are Aaron and Skylark riffing with each other, usually about asses, sticking things in asses, saying words that sound like they’re referring to asses even though they aren’t (the “they hate us cause they ain’t us” gag goes on long enough that it’s kinda funny in a stupid way).

The bits with Skylark interviewing his guests in the U.S. are probably the best part of the movie. It’s a shame that they wasted that stuff on this movie because a film spoofing talk show hosts’ attempts to be edgy despite their completely sterile environment because it’s TV and trying to get dirt out of their guests would be quite welcome in the right hands. Everyone probably already knows about Eminem’s “coming out” on the show, which loses its shock value because it’s already been plastered all over news sites. It’s certainly not the smartest gag to pull considering how many gay slurs he’s spouted in his music, but whatever. Rob Lowe’s revelation is by far superior given its pointlessness.

It’s nonsensical that many reviewers have complained about the movie’s lack of political satire, when it obviously had no intention of being anywhere near as smart or as timeless as “Dr. Strangelove.” Director Evan Goldberg surely was aware that to even attempt that without the kind of talent and intentions Stanley Kubrick or Peter Sellers possessed would be completely foolish, wouldn’t work, and would appeal to nobody. They went the cheap route here. It’s simple jokes that everyone will get and maybe half the people who see it will get laughs out of half of it. Don’ t expect too much and you won’t be disappointed.

As for the supreme leader, it seems like a pretty fair depiction of North Korea’s dictator. He’s not presented as a silly fat Asian man who has trouble with the ladies or whatever. Instead, he’s a pretty cool guy who loves fast cars and playing basketball, has major insecurities because of who his dad was, is worried about being perceived as gay because he likes margaritas, and the unfortunate circumstance of having immense power and having created enemies out of the rest of the world. Basically, he’s the Ultimate Bro. He’s almost sympathetic, in a way, which actually seems too generous. He is a horrible authoritarian dictator who keeps his people in line with an iron fist and the threat of death to anyone who opposes him. Let’s not forget about that here. In films made in Allied countries during World War II, Hitler never got such a grand treatment.

The biggest problem is the eventual plot Sook concocts to incite upheaval in North Korea, once she’s explained that killing him won’t solve the problems (actually, an intelligent observation). Don’t get me wrong, it’s cool that a North Korean woman is afforded the ability to solve North Korea’s problems. But the plan is to have Skylark use his interview with Kim to expose the leader’s shortcomings to the North Korean people in order to spur them toward an uprising. Probably most North Koreans are pretty well kept in the dark, but people in any country that has as many problems as North Korea does are usually smart enough to figure out on their own that something isn’t right. The problem isn’t that they are brainwashed into believing the propaganda their leader puts out. It’s more that they don’t have forces to overthrow the powerful government. But the movie treats the people as if they are completely in the dark about the atrocities Kim has committed against them, and it’s the white dudes’ job to expose that. It’s a misdiagnosis of the real problem, and it makes the West’s or, specifically, the U.S.’s brand of “freedom” out to be the solution. It makes the people of North Korea (Asians) out to be intellectually and ideologically inferior rather than simply being powerless.

And, of course, showing an American graphically killing Kim certainly could be considered as an act of war. If some Asian or Middle Eastern country made a movie about killing Barack Obama, how would Americans react? Well, conservatives would revel in it, but you know what I mean. There would still be a general outcry and calls for extra helpings of patriotism to be served with every bucket of popcorn and whatnot.

The most annoying aspect in all of this is Franco’s and Rogan’s and, generally, Hollywood’s whining about free speech and bowing to terrorism and all that shit (even though there still is little evidence North Korea had anything to do with the hacking and threats directed at Sony). It’s not really a free speech issue anyway. Obama has been all for showing the movie. It’s Sony that had to accept movie theaters canceling their showings of the film. Weirdly, this was a film the might have been least likely to play in arthouse theaters, but ironically ended up being shown exclusively in those establishments.

The Franco/Rogan tweets would have seemed somewhat tongue-in-cheek if Rogan hadn’t been caught acting like such a baby about all of it.

Worst of all, citing this as a free speech issue is a slap in the face to so many other movies that get the cold shoulder from movie studios because they think it isn’t what ~~white~~ general audiences will pay to see.

Recently, the AV Club posted an interview with David Oyelowo about soon to be released “Selma” about Martin Luther King Jr., and the challenges surrounding that movie’s production. The most disappointing thing to read was when he talked about the movie taking seven years to complete because of the huge resistance in Hollywood to making a film about King that didn’t include some sort of white savior character. King is arguably the most influential figure in the U.S. of the 20th Century, and there really hasn’t been any major production made about his life. There’s been complaints about the suppression of free speech to get this film or similar ones completed, even though it seems like it will have been so deserving of its place in cinematic history. So, it’s ridiculous to hear people complain that “The Interview” needs to be released for “freedom” or whatever. I wouldn’t argue that this movie would be censored, but the truth is that it hasn’t been censored at all. The movie was briefly cancelled by the studio before being released in select theaters and in digital on-demand. That’s all the resistance it has faced.

And when should we expect to see studio-backed films about Asian-Americans made by a Asian-Americans or better domestic distribution of films made in Asia?

“The Interview” is what it is: a pointless movie with an unnecessary amount of trouble stirred up about it. It shouldn’t be anybody’s patriotic duty to see it anymore than eating at McDonald’s or watching football. Nobody is better off for its existence except the people involved in its production. It will represent little more than an embarrassing episode that drudged up a lot of temporary, forced patriotism for no reason. Keep your fingers crossed though, there’s still time for Kim to start World War 3 over this crap.

Countdown to Liftoff: “Inception” (2010)

Posted on December 23, 2014 by babemoby

Christopher Nolan followed up his most anticipated and arguably most popular film “The Dark Knight” with something totally off the wall in “Inception.” It doesn’t have the weird stigma of say, magicians, but making a movie about reaching into a person’s dreams to plant an idea in their head was something so off-the-wall, perhaps only a director like Nolan could pull it off.

Whereas the Batman movies are a bit more straightforward from his other fare, “Inception” both hearkened back to his older films, but combining it with the big-budget epic sprawl of “The Dark Knight.” The backing of a studio allowed Nolan to create some incredible visual effects that wouldn’t have been possible for him back when he was making “Memento” and “Insomnia.” As such, it’s great to just marvel as he unfurls the dream world he creates. It’s easily his most visually impressive film prior to “Interstellar,” of course, but still a completely different sort of accomplishment from his newest movie.

The film is about, well, a lot of people, but it mostly follows Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a dream bandit, for lack of a better term, and he’s being hired by businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) to convince the son of his near-death rival CEO to sell the business. Of course, Cobb’s not gonna do anything conventional like throw him in a car and threaten to kill him and his family or anything (at least not in the waking world), he’s going to tap into the guy’s subconscious and convince him that selling is the best course of action.

Considering Nolan typically works with a hyper-realistic style of storytelling, you might figure that a film about dreams might go deep into the science of dreams, like why people dream about the things they do or what those dreams mean. But no, instead, he concocts a heist movie that just happens to take place mostly inside a man’s head while he’s sleeping. It’s “Ocean’s Eleven” meets “The Matrix.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t go into the nature of dreams at all. Part of any good heist is putting a team together, and a key member of any good heist group is the unproven rookie who is a bit green, but although that’s a curse, it can also be an asset, as people like that are generally more hungry and bring fresher ideas to the table, like youthful enthusiasm and all that. Who else says youthful enthusiasm like Ellen Page? Her Ariadne is taken through the paces of dream structuring, so that she can be the team’s dream architect (it’s hard to come up with titles for these people since nothing like them exists). But even as the audience is treated to some really cool shots of worlds turning over on themselves and paper explosions, all of the language the characters use, whether it has any basis in reality or not, is mere gobbledygook here. Its purpose is to explain the world these dreamsnatchers operate in. It does make some references to common events that happen in dreams, like the falling sensation or death in dreams. It’s enough to make someone think “yeah, I get what they’re talking about”, but it wouldn’t be anything to bring up in conversation among your neurologist friends, lest you look foolish.

If nothing else, “Inception” made for endless meme fodder.

Unfortunately, it does seem like there’s quite a bit of wasted opportunity in many ways in this film. The science behind it all may be true to some degree, but it doesn’t really matter much considering the unlikelihood of anyone entering the viewer’s dreams while they’re sleeping. It’s all really cool to look at and think about — as long as the movie’s runtime. But once its over, there’s not really much left to think about. The movie doesn’t really go into the nature of dreams or their mechanics beyond any basic level. So there’s very little to relate to a person’s real life, which generally is the goal of good science fiction.

Another main problem is Cobb. The audience isn’t really given much reason to care about him, but is still expected to, considering his storyline is that he’s dealing with anguish over his dead wife (Nolan’s dead woman!) and exile from the U.S., which prevents him from being with his children. A parent’s love for his or her children can generally work as a character’s motivation, but considering the audience never sees him interact with his kids, it makes for a detached connection. The bulk of his character arc has him dealing with the loss of his wife, with whom he went dreamdiving way back, which caused her to still believe she was dreaming even in waking life, and thus killed herself to try and wake up. It’s weird and complicated, and the scenes that involve Cobb and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), are wrapped in that gobbledygook dreamy talk language that makes it difficult to feel any human connection to the relationship that is or isn’t. DiCaprio makes up for it by just by being a great actor, but Cobb is no Han Solo or Indiana Jones.

Even Leo looks confused.

It’s a double shame that because Cobb’s story takes up so much room, the audience never really learns much about the other characters in the movie. For instance, in “Ocean’s Eleven” and its sequels, each member of the team has a specialty, so he gets his moment to shine during his part in the heist. The brothers and the actors playing them aren’t major stars or anything, but they do have their roles to play, and it’s fun to see them try to one up each other over the course of the movie. The side characters in “Inception” have areas of expertise to some degree, but come on, they work on dreams. It’s not hard to understand all the cogs and bits that go into making up a heist, but here, it’s just guys walking around like it’s normal inside a dream, as if it were reality. There isn’t much specialization among the characters, so none of them really get a chance to shine.

That’s disappointing because the glimpse the audience is given of each crew member’s life is intriguing enough that you want to know more about them. This was basically Tom Hardy’s introduction to wide audiences (which is awesome because he’s a great charismatic actor), and he’s a joy to watch in this movie, but not really knowing anything about who his character is makes it difficult to differentiate him from the others. The same is true of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Arthur and Dileep Rao’s Doctor Yusuf. Even Ariadne doesn’t get much background beyond she’s a student at Oxford. They seem like fascinating people, but you’ll never know what’s really behind them because the movie doesn’t show you.

He's a dream thing duder. He works on the dreams. He's fun to watch, but what the hell does this guy actually do?

He’s a dream thing duder. Uhh, he works on the dreams. He’s fun to watch, but what the hell does this guy actually do?

But it’s OK that not everything clicks in the movie, because it makes for a great thriller and an immersive, dreamlike atmosphere, where everything is just weird enough that you know you’re dreaming. It’s an action-adventure inside someone’s head! Who wouldn’t think that’s fun? It’s OK that there’s no science-philosophy dichotomy to ponder, because it’s just enjoyable to watch. Fluffy sci-fi can be great, like “Guardians of the Galaxy.” It does pique a viewers imagination just by exploring mostly uncharted territory. Even if Cobb doesn’t connect with the audience, the twist ending will leave viewers guessing for weeks. For all that doesn’t work in the movie, it also feels like a greater fulfillment on the promise Nolan’s early work showed with the finances to dream (hah) as big as he could, and he obviously dreams pretty big.

And it is interesting to see Robert Fischer’s (Cilian Murphy) story unfold, as his is the mind the ultimate dreamteam is planting their big idea in. His backstory is told elegantly, through Cobb’s crew’s exploration of the dream and the different methods they use to try to coerce him to alter his decision. They ultimately succeed in manipulating the man into doing what they want him to do. In a way, it’s a bit disturbing, but the different ways they try to persuade him to change his mind are an abstract way of looking at methods of psychological manipulation. The team tries kidnapping him and beating him to make him change his mind, and then make it appear that they’re doing the same to his dad’s assistant (all inside the dream). Later, Cobb approaches Robert in the dream and tries to act like they know each other. It’s a different way of looking at a horrible thing that people do to one another, so whatever that’s worth. Murphy is not exactly known for playing sympathetic characters, but there’s a great talent in taking a stereotypical spoiled brat and making that character relatable to the audience, and he accomplishes that here.

Cillian Murphy does something a bit different from the other Christopher Nolan movies he’s in. Well, he’s not the Scarecrow, so anything would be different.

It’s also fun to see Tom Behringer as Robert’s father’s assistant. Nolan always comes up with great lesser-known actors to fill smaller roles in his movies, like Eric Roberts in “The Dark Knight” and Rutger Hauer in “Batman Begins.” That makes for a nice bonus for movie nerds.

Making a fun thriller was somewhat of a first for Nolan. Though his other movies are great, at times, they might leave the viewer asking “why so serious?” The Cobb storyline with his wife is an attempt at gravitas, but the whole thing is too absurd to take too seriously. But some fun performances from Hardy and Page and the tremendously creative visuals make for an enjoyable 2 1/2-hour extravaganza. It’s great that Nolan finally got recognition from the Academy with a Best Picture nomination, although had “The Dark Knight” been released a year later, it might well have gotten in as well since that was the year the Oscars started allowing more than five nominees for that category. Nolan will probably never make an Oscar winner because he doesn’t create movies with the real-world gravitas Oscar demands, but even a nomination is a huge accomplishment.

Is it still spinning?

Nolan would continue to dream big (as in making a really long movie) with his return to Gotham. Next time we’ll look at “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Countdown to Liftoff: The Dark Knight (2008)

Posted on December 4, 2014 by babemoby

Christopher Nolan returned to the Batman mythos with the “Dark Knight,” following his cinematic reboot of the series, “Batman Begins,” possibly the most highly anticipated Batman film in a very long time. True to the title, “The Dark Knight” went to a darker place than any Batman movie prior.

Undoubtedly, in every way, this movie belongs to Heath Ledger and his demented version of the Joker. Yes, it’s a Batman film, and he is the protagonist, but everything about it revolves around his most famous foe. It’s impossible to separate the legacy of this film from Ledger and the tragedy of his death during production. He went out with one hell of a performance.

The Joker is easily this film’s greatest strength, but in a way also its greatest weakness. This will certainly go down as one of the great performances in the history of film, as Ledger completely transforms himself into this evil, manic, super villain (basically, he’s Lewis Black) that’s so far removed from any of his other roles. This isn’t your grandfather’s Joker (especially if your grandfather is Jack Nicholsen). He didn’t just put on some clown makeup and prosthetic and ham it up a la Cesar Romero. He crafts a memorable character that permeates the entire film, even many moments where he isn’t even present. The Oscar he won for best supporting actor (which could have just as well have been best actor) was well-deserved.

Ya know?

The Joker looms over the entire movie. His schemes are so pervasive and unpredictable that they continually send the city into panic, as well as Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) and all the people he loves. He’s the antithesis of the honorable and principled Bruce, as he has no ulterior motive for the chaos he perpetrates, other than that he seems to find it amusing, and he is entertained by the conflict it creates between himself and the Caped Crusader. He’s a master of manipulation, and he gets into the head of everyone who crosses his path. That’s evident whenever he talks about how he got the scars on the sides of his mouth that create a permanent, unsettling smile. Every time he tells the story, it’s something completely different.

The downside to the Joker is that he overshadows everything else in the movie. Part of that is due to the rather bland plot and shallow character arcs. But it seems like Nolan knew what he had (The Joker) and ran with it as far as he could. It would have been nice if he would have put more effort into everything else.

The movie starts with a cracking bank heist, which serves to build the Joker character splendidly. This isn’t like many bank robberies where the criminals assure everyone that everything will be alright if they just cooperate. The Joker’s henchmen force several of the bank’s patrons to hold grenades while they do their work. One by one as each henchman completes his assigned task, another one eliminates his fellow crook until the only one left is the man himself. It makes you think that word would get around that he doesn’t share his bounty with his underlings and that working with him won’t get you anywhere good. But then again, he proves throughout the film how manipulative he can be.

Then there’s a scene of Batman breaking up a meeting of one of the villains from the last movie, the Scarecrow’s (Cilian Murphy), but also running into a couple wannabe Batmans wearing hockey pads. That shows the film is still grounded in relative reality, as there probably would be copybats if a guy starting rolling around in a military vehicle beating up bad guys. It’s a nice touch.

But then, the movie moves into a rather vapid scheme that has something to do with Chinese investors. It serves no real purpose, other than to formally introduce the Joker and give Batman an excuse to execute a cool Mission Impossible-style black ops type of mission to nab the leader.

But then, the Joker’s only plan seems to be to mess with Batman and the people of Gotham, albeit in rather demented ways. The fear the Joker creates makes provides the film with urgency, as he promises to start killing important people around the city until he can meet with the Batman.

Maggie should have been in the first movie too.

In a weird casting snafu, Maggie Gyllenhaal takes over the role of Rachel from Katie Holmes who played her in the first movie. It’s always strange when a character has a new actor. In this case, however, it is a welcome change as Gyllenhaal is a much more versatile and charismatic actress. In fact, Gyllenhaal is very convincing in showing that she should have had the part from the beginning. Rachel suddenly shows off a stronger, sassier, more vibrant attitude that she didn’t have before.

FILE: Eliot Spitzer, Wife Announce They Are Ending Marriage

Thankfully, this was not one of Harvey’s faces.

Which is a bit of a shame, because the character is basically fodder for Bruce and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and the Joker to fight over. Her new boyfriend, the Eliot Spitzer-esque (pre-high class escort scandal) Dent is here to clean up the corruption in the city, even though it seems Batman really does all the heavy lifting. Naturally, the Joker is here to upset the balance of normalcy in Gotham. By doing that, he kidnaps Rachel, leading Dent and Bruce, who still pines for her, to launch a full-scale campaign to get her back. It doesn’t go well, she winds up dead. Dent winds up horribly disfigured. All hell breaks loose. Cats and dogs living together, etc.

Bruce is shaken up, as he still loved Rachel, and he thought Dent could basically take over the mantle of the city’s hero because he really doesn’t want to do the Batman thing anymore based on a rather foolish promise she made back in the first movie when she was still Katie Holmes. It leads him to wonder what all this Batman nonsense was for in the first place. That’s kind of a weird crisis to have, considering the whole costumed crusader thing seemed like a pretty bad idea in the first place.

If he really wanted to help the city, then as the resident stinking rich guy, instead of rolling around the city blowing up shit with a military grade vehicle or gallivanting around on a yacht with the Russian ballet, maybe he could have invested some of that money in the city’s infrastructure with jobs creation and welfare. Let’s face it, the Batman thing is cool and all if you wanna make a movie about it or something. It was useful in rooting out some of the criminals who were running the city before and in dealing with weirdos like Scarecrow, Ra’s al Ghul and the Joker. But when it comes to providing the city what it really needs, a caped crusader is probably pretty low on the list. Trying to pass his legendary figure status off onto Harvey, who didn’t do as much as Batman seems like an odd way to go about things.

Sad Bruce Wayne. Sad. So sad.

Once Harvey’s got half his face scalded off, he starts going about things in a rather odd way himself. Though his transformation into the popular villain Two-Face makes for some fun moments, including killing Eric Roberts (whose presence is always more than welcome in any thriller movie), it feels like his character is wasted. As he’s lying in his hospital bed, explaining to Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) that he’s going to be the “Harvey Two-Face” the police always thought he was, it might make the viewer wonder why where that Harvey Two-Face was hiding earlier in the movie. There’s one scene where he threatens to kill a henchman of the Joker’s because Rachel has gone missing, but that’s it. Two-Face was a fascinating character in other Batman stories, who recognized that most things in life happen by chance, and so he made all of his decisions by flipping the two-headed coin he carried around with him. As it is in the film, he goes rogue for no other reason than his Rachel’s death. It just makes him seem whiny rather than a man who had been teetering on the edge and just got pushed over. There’s nothing before his transformation to show that he might have had an anger issue or at his coin-operated decision making skills. He basically just came off as a goody two-shoes who is willing to get a little bit of dirt on his hands, but not too much, to get the jobs done. It’s OK that the movie character didn’t live up to the one in say, the Animated Series, because a movie should be able to stand on its own apart from its source material. But it’s a problem that in a movie going for a realistic vision of a super hero tale, that the way his character progresses isn’t very logical, as well as only being based on what happens to his woman. Eckhart is a capable actor who could have handled the character’s nuances, but his talents are wasted here. In every way, Two-Face falls flat.

Two-Face is not half the man he was in the comics or the Animated Series.

Then there’s the whole thing with the Joker and his social experiment with the two ferries. First of all, to clarify, Tiny Lister is always fun to see, and he’s fun here too. But the whole episode is pretty bad. It is interesting that the Joker put those two boats in a dilemma where he was giving each one the chance to blow up the other, but if neither did it by a certain time, he would blow both up. That’s a great scheme. So much time is spent on both ships, neither of which holds any characters relevant to the story outside of this incident, and considering the film didn’t take enough time to develop some of its principal characters, it’s unnecessary.

Well hey, at least Tiny Lister is here.

The way the situation is set up, one boat is full of regular civilians, but the other carries prisoners. The way the direction of the movie went, it’s unsure whether the audience is intended to believe the prisoners are simply evil criminals or a more realistic view where many people in prison are in their predicament due to a combination of a bad hand dealt to them in life and some unfortunate choices they made in difficult situations (probably the former). What Nolan seems to be trying to show with this is that it’s easy for people to say these “criminals” don’t deserve to live, but it’s not easy for even the most self-righteous person to be the executioner. Based on everything surrounding the events of the last few months in Ferguson, Missouri, none of that seems to be true of real people. It doesn’t take much wrongdoing in some people’s eyes to see another person as a criminal who deserves to be executed. That’s a biased viewpoint that likely comes from prejudices, often based on race, as well as gender, sometimes on social status. Over the last year, it seems like people, and especially police, have been pretty quick to pull the trigger just because they don’t like the people around them. It doesn’t appear to be a difficult decision for those people. This episode shows that Nolan views the world through rosier glasses. In a way, prisoner Tiny Lister’s grand gesture of throwing his ship’s detonator out the window is an acknowledgement that he and the other prisoners do deserve to die, because they already had their chance in life, and those “normal” people shouldn’t have to suffer for that. This film is seven years old, so of course it couldn’t have accounted for events within the past year, but in today’s climate, it sends a condemning message about people labeled as criminals that has ugly implications. And besides, police violence isn’t really a new thing, it’s just that people who knew the victims are now fed up with it and working to get people’s attention.

The movie also takes advantage of some of the political happenings in the years leading up to its release, mainly regarding things that happened under President George W. Bush’s time in office. When the Joker kidnaps one of the Batman wannabes, he records a video that resembles the ones made by al-Qaeda that surfaced on the Internet, which depicted the terrorists beheading prisoners. Batman creates a surveillance network tapping into people’s cellphones to pick up surrounding audio, which Q Lucius (Morgan Freeman) decries as being too invasive of privacy, resembling the Patriot Act and now recalling the Edward Snowden-NSA scandal. The Joker uses one of the Arkham patients as a suicide bomber, essentially. The Joker’s use of fear tactics and his assassination of several political figures creates a sense of paranoia around the city and Harvey gives a speech that recalls Bush’s push to return to “normalcy,” and Gotham has always represented New York, which obviously was the site of 9/11. Even the mostly useless plot about the Chinese contractors makes some connection to real world events. Perhaps it was an attempt by Nolan to be “edgy” or to make social commentary, but the terrorism related elements come off as kind of exploitative in hindsight for those who have knowledge of the state of the world back then. Maybe in 2008, those images helped to evoke feelings of fear in the audience by association. Then again, maybe to future audiences, those elements will simply come off as effective and disturbing to those who weren’t privy to those times. The inclusion of those images seems unnecessary though to someone who remembers those events clearly.

This movie will always be linked to Ledger’s death. Though it leaves a remarkable legacy for him, it does bring into question the type of method acting where actors try to get inside the head of the characters they are playing. Knowing how he died makes it appear likely that this role was probably a key factor in his death. He had to go to a very dark place psychologically to understand this version of the Joker. Maybe it was too much for him to handle. Assuming that’s true, you can say stupid things like he died doing what he loved and all that. But he loved acting, and you can’t act when you’re dead. There will be so many spots in so many movies that he could have filled. Although he received critical acclaim previously for “Brokeback Mountain,” this was undoubtedly a breakout role for him that would have catapulted his career to new heights. But he didn’t survive it, so the world will never know what could have been. Who knows for sure everything that led to his death, especially as it sounded he was reclusive in those final days? But a role in one movie isn’t worth a person’s life. There probably never will be another character as demented as Nolan’s Joker, though Jared Leto has already been cast for “Suicide Squad,” but that Joker probably won’t be quite as far out there as this one was. The last the world will see of Ledger under the makeup will be the character hanging upside down prophesying to Batman “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” It’s sad that sentiment won’t be true.

The Joker on his own makes “The Dark Knight.” This is the first of Nolan’s movies where it seems like all the separate elements he’s working with don’t really blend into a good cohesive whole. The Joker is the glue that holds everything together, but although the Joker works remarkably well all-round, he’s really the only thing that works. But that’s good enough to recommend to the few people who might not have seen this movie by now to check it out. In reference to my larger, ongoing project, it wouldn’t be surprising to see this movie on the AFI’s next 100 Movies list thanks almost entirely to Ledger. If there is any director that would be a lock for a new entry onto the list, it would have to be Christopher Nolan. If this movie doesn’t make it, perhaps it will be the one that followed this one. Next time let’s take a look at “Inception.”