Throwback Thursday: The Dark Knight Rises (with guest blogger Hardeep Aujla from Word Is Bond)

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket I saved, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket. This time I've gotten Hardeep Aujla, an editor from a U.K.-based hip-hop blog I've contributed pieces to, Word Is Bond, to come back after his guest TBT post about The Signal and discuss the movie on the ticket I drew.

I've noticed that the strongest Christopher Nolan movies contain the least amount of scenes of male actors crying, while the least satisfying Nolan movies are the ones with the most male cry-face scenes. Following? I haven't watched that one yet. Memento and Insomnia? Barely any male weeping scenes in those standout Nolan thrillers. Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception? Slightly more male blubbering. But it was kept to a minimum--just three or four male crying scenes in the first two Batman films--and in each of those two films, one of those three or four scenes proved how much of an asset Gary Oldman, who's great at crying scenes and didn't overdo it in those films, was to Nolan's Batman trilogy. I can't remember if Hugh Jackman or Christian Bale were ever in need of one of those magician's hankies for more than just a magic trick in The Prestige, but I believe the crying was also kept to a minimum in that one.

As for The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, Michael Caine had to cry in every single scene of his in The Dark Knight Rises, and he did it in that anguished voice I can't ever hear again without thinking of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's hilarious impressions of later-period Caine sounding like he's yodeling during emotional scenes, while 70% of Interstellar's nearly three-hour running time consisted of Matthew McConaughey blubbering exactly like Jon Hamm in the SNL auto-tuned crying sketch. The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar have turned out to be two of Nolan's least satisfying blockbusters, although I'll take The Dark Knight Rises over the Joel Schumacher version of Batman any day. So Mr. Nolan, if you want to win back some of the critics who weren't impressed with Interstellar, maybe you should try relying less on making several of your stars cry-talk like Felicity on Arrow all last season. Meanwhile, Hardeep enjoyed The Dark Knight Rises more than I did. He explains why.--JJA

The Dark Knight Rises
By Hardeep Aujla

Bob Kane thought the cake-bomb-pondering Batman of the 60's was an enjoyable farce, but that wasn't the character he had in mind when pencilling his way to a 6000% pay-rise in 1939. Such was the success of Batman. But it wasn't all enjoyable for the one-time kid who just wanted to draw goofballs like Popeye when he grew up. If things went south when he slapped the first sketches on DC editor Vince Sullivan's desk, he would have gladly gone back to drawing funnies. "I received more pleasure from drawing them than I ever did from drawing Batman", wrote Kane in his '89 auto-biography Batman and Me. And that's kinda the point of Batman; we're supposed to feel uneasy about being in the company of this character who at first glance looks like he reps the villainous axis. Furthermore, Batman is alluded to be a personal projection of Kane's; it's right there in the bio's title, the coalescence of a beat-down he took as a kid whilst pretending to be Zorro and rum-running-era New York. Roger Ebert found Tim Burton's noir-laden Batman (1989) to be "a depressing experience". Then many viewers deemed Christopher Nolan's recent trilogy, particularly the concluding entry Dark Knight Rises, to be sullen and overwrought, which was vindication in the ears of others who were on board with Bob's (and writer/character flesher-outer Bill Finger's) intimate, dark vision and had waited years to see it return to the screen.

Sure, the films might not bring a whole lot of new ideas to the table that the many weekly rags and hardback "graphic novels" have given us over the decades, but if you asked Bob Kane, nothing else ever did after Superman and Batman bookended the continuum of all superhero possibilities. Regardless, it's probably fair to say that Bob and Bill would've approved of Nolan's submersion of Batman back into the dark and his eagerness to use him as a device to speak to audiences on a different level. And I have enjoyed how Nolan speaks about contemporary issues pervading our times in these films.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Selina Kyle, covertly anomalous (or perhaps not entirely given the crowd) during a ballroom thing, whispers to Bruce Wayne, "You'll wonder how you ever lived so large and left so little for the rest of us..." While this does echo contemporary economic injustices and does unsettle Bruce in a similar way it probably unsettles the real-life financial "elite" in the West who are somehow surprised that billions in the East would like the same standard of living as them, this film doesn't have a neo-imperialist agenda just like The Dark Knight didn't have a pro-George Bush agenda, despite how many opinions would have you otherwise believe. Instead we have Bane, whose character is conveyed superbly, overriding the need for facial expressions with a menacing mask and subtly expressive body language, from placing the back of his hand on someone's shoulder to an unflinching walk despite the surprise revelation of the Bat-Glider: small touches that spoke volumes. Bane attacks a city we are shown to be undeserving of pity or protection primarily, again, through the indignation of Selina Kyle, who observes how the rich show no austerity and resorts to cat-burglary out of inevitability in an unjust city: a product of Gotham (a character in its own right in this film) as much as Batman or his supervillains are. Bane's storm on the stock exchange is therefore a not-so-subtle device to this end, and from there on in we get a few big plot holes and, more importantly, a Tale Of Two Cities-style discourse which Nolan openly footnotes the entire film with via a direct quote at the end.

Fan-made poster

But like he did in The Dark Knight with the ferry climax, Nolan counters villainy with the kind of virtuous responses that all great comic books often do (Raimi also struck gold with the same idea during the train sequence in Spider-Man 2). This time Batman must re-live his genesis following a beat-down of his own that would've had Bob Kane flashing back. Spurred on by the words of his late-father that've echoed throughout the entire trilogy, he rises once again from defeat but this time things are noticeably different. Most striking cinematically is that his final punch-up with Bane is in broad daylight, a departure from pretty much every major fight scene in the series. He no longer relies on the shadows as an accomplice; his mission now is not to strike fear into the enemy but to inspire Gotham's oppressed inhabitants. The classic formalities of narrative dictate that Batman too must perish with the darkness of the city that created him, and his sacrifice at the end achieves this whilst also redeeming him from the long-standing dishonour established at the end of The Dark Knight. In this regard, The Dark Knight Rises has a much more positive and conclusive ending than many attribute it with: a story that shows Bruce Wayne won't always be a victim of both the city and himself, and a story that Bob and Bill, at least, might've taken professional and personal comfort from.

Hardeep Aujla writes and edits album reviews for Word Is Bond in Leicester, England. Selections from Hans Zimmer's Dark Knight Rises score can be heard during the AFOS blocks "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H."

Batman: The Animated Series turns 20 this week, so "AFOS Prime" celebrates its Knightly brand of stylish action and dashing score music

I got so busy producing a weekly vlog that nobody watches and has become a little less fun to work on that I almost forgot that 20 years ago this week, Batman: The Animated Series debuted on Fox on September 5, 1992 with an episode about Catwoman ("The Cat and the Claw, Part I") to whet the appetites of viewers who had seen Batman tussle with a much kinkier version of Selina Kyle in Tim Burton's controversial Batman Returns over the summer.

The B:TAS crew was more subtle and clever than Burton about sneaking adult content into their version of Batman. Without attracting the attention of parents' groups and conservatives--the wet blankets of America--like Burton did in Batman Returns, the B:TAS crew got away with sneaking in elements like a giant vagina attacking Batman, which producer Bruce Timm claimed was unintentional, and a lesbian couple: Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy (maybe B:TAS got away with so much also because it was kind of under-the-radar compared to Burton's movies, which were exposed to a larger international audience).

B:TAS is a show I dug so much as a high-schooler and is one of the few shows I tried to collect DVD box sets of (and never finished doing so) back when I was employed, I could afford to buy DVD box sets and people actually bought DVDs. Because of its 20th anniversary, A Fistful of Soundtracks' "AFOS Prime" and "New Cue Revue" blocks will begin streaming several selections from La-La Land Records' recent second volume of B:TAS' well-crafted score cues next week.

I think I've spoken enough about the original music on the show ("Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack: A Walker to remember" from December 2008 and "A little Knight music: The second Batman: The Animated Series soundtrack from La-La Land is even better than the first" from a couple of months ago), so I want to say a few words about the show itself. Both B:TAS and another animated Fox show, The Simpsons, ignited my love for smartly written animation and made me want to write for animation or comics someday. On-screen, Doctor Who star David Tennant once memorably told '80s Doctor Who star Peter Davison--both in character and as a fan of the Davison era of the show--that "You were my Doctor." In a similar fashion, a certain generation of viewers considers Adam West to be their Batman. Though West was a great comedic Batman, Kevin Conroy's take on the Dark Knight remains my favorite on-screen incarnation of the character.

And as us admirers of B:TAS celebrate the show's 20th anniversary, we're not just celebrating two decades of terrific animated TV by the likes of Timm, Eric Radomski, Alan Burnett and Paul Dini and staffers who passed on after the show's run like composers Shirley Walker (whose B:TAS work Bear McCreary frequently cites as a major influence on his TV scoring career) and Harvey R. Cohen and director Boyd Kirkland. We're also celebrating two decades of Conroy's voice work as Batman. I never expected the Julliard-trained Conroy to continue to voice Batman about a decade and a half after B:TAS stopped production, but there he still is, pretending to rough up motherfuckers as the Dark Knight in DC Animated Universe feature films and video games.

Kevin Conroy (Photo source: Esquire)

Though West underplayed his Batman quite well, and Michael Keaton managed to bring an interesting stamp to both the Bruce Wayne and Batman halves of the character despite the massive constraints of his difficult-to-walk-around-and-act-in costume, Conroy, who was far from a comics fan, outdid both West and Keaton by rethinking how the character spoke on-screen.

"As soon as [the producers] described his schizophrenic lifestyle, it bugged me," recalled Conroy to Esquire recently. "I thought, Wait a minute, he is the Bill Gates of Gotham. He is the most eligible bachelor. Everyone knows who he is. And he puts on a cape, and no one recognizes him? Come on."

Conroy, one of 75 actors who auditioned for the part, decided to give Batman two slightly different voices, "fundamentally altering the legacy of a comic book he had only passing knowledge of," as Ali Taylor Lange wrote in the Esquire piece on Conroy. As Batman, Conroy opted for raspy, mysterious and dashing--because of that badass voice, guys like me wanted to be like him, while many of the show's female viewers ended up wanting to do him--while in businessman/philanthropist mode as Bruce, he came up with a more relaxed voice, but without sounding too foppish or cartoony.

There's more to that dual-voiced reading than raspy-vs.-relaxed though. The psychological homework that Conroy did to distinguish his take on the character was as well-thought-out as all the other aspects of B:TAS that elevated it from standard Saturday morning superhero fare to an unconventional and sophisticated superhero cartoon that appealed to adults.

"If he sounds that different, where does the voice come from? It has to come from the pain," said Conroy to Esquire. "I decided that the Bruce Wayne persona, the public persona, is the performance, and the Batman character is who he is when he is most natural. When he's putting on the cape, he is becoming himself."

The Dark Knight: Never mind the bollocks, here's the Joker

I waited until after the opening weekend lines died down and finally saw The Dark Knight. Maybe Christopher Nolan--who hasn't yet decided if he's going to make a third Batman film--should just quit while he's ahead. I don't know how he can surpass what he's achieved with the morally ambiguous and politically charged yet electrifying Dark Knight.

Third installments often mark the nadir of a film series (Return of the Jedi, The Godfather Part III, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spider-Man 3, which transformed Tobey Maguire into an emo lesbian Dancing with the Stars contestant, and fifthly, the little-known Debbie Does Benji). Perhaps Nolan's uncertainty about agreeing to write and direct a third movie stems from being burned as a moviegoer by so many franchises that have succumbed to the Law of Diminishing Returns--including once upon a time, Batman itself, before Nolan revitalized the series.

Of all the summer 2008 blockbusters, I looked forward to The Dark Knight the most because I'm a longtime Batman fan. The character always appealed to me more than Superman because he's a hero who looks like a villain, and sometimes he finds himself becoming the villain, like in The Dark Knight. I've read the Batman comics on and off, I liked the Tim Burton films when I was a kid (these days, I don't think parts of Burton's Batman films have aged very well, particularly elements of the 1989 Batman) and I'm a huge fan of both Batman: The Animated Series and the Nolan version of the franchise. I found Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever to be so juvenile--especially in its portrayal of Two-Face, who's an even more complicated enemy than the Joker because he teeters back and forth between good and evil, something that Batman Forever got wrong--that I refused to see Batman & Robin, and I still refuse to watch a single minute of that 1997 piece of Batguano.

Nolan's refusal to approach the likes of Two-Face and the Joker as cartoonish a la Schumacher--he restored the menacing qualities that these villains had in the post-'60s comics and the '90s animated series--may be one of the reasons why The Dark Knight had a record-shattering opening weekend. The film is quite lengthy for a summer blockbuster, but nobody in the afternoon audience I saw it with ever got restless or bored. I don't go to movie theaters as often as I used to anymore because I'm frustrated with other moviegoers' exceedingly stupid behavior--talking on cell phones, running up and down the aisles like a chimp on speed, bringing their babies with them--but except for one occasionally testy infant, everyone in this more polite-than-usual afternoon audience kept their mouths shut during the entire film. They were completely captivated by this differently toned Batman and the remarkable performances of the ensemble (particularly by Aaron Eckhart, Gary Oldman, an uncredited Nicky Katt in a great small part, the late Heath Ledger in his penultimate performance and Christian Bale, whose often derided Batrasp sounds more like Richard Moll's B:TAS voice for Two-Face than the less gravelly voice that we're accustomed to hearing come out of Batman's mouth). It's the same kind of captivation I feel when I watch a really good Michael Mann flick.

Speaking of Mann, his work influenced Nolan during this Batman installment. (I wonder if Nolan also took some cues from Gotham Central. The Joker's killing spree and the interrogation room scenes are reminiscent of Gotham Central's "Soft Targets" arc, which had the Joker terrorizing Gotham City with sniper attacks.) Before he made Batman Begins, Nolan reportedly screened Blade Runner for his crew and told them, "This is how we're going to make Batman." In The Dark Knight, Nolan turned to Heat as his cinematic model, and it's evident in the forensics sequences (it's awesome to see Batman act more like a detective again) and the major set pieces, particularly the opening bank heist, which even includes a cameo by Heat supporting player William Fichtner, and the thrilling truck/SWAT van/Tumbler-turned-Batpod chase. The elegantly staged action sequences are an improvement over the ones in Batman Begins, which were criticized for being poorly shot and choppily edited, although I think Nolan was trying to capture the disorientation a criminal must feel when his ass is being handed to him by a swiftly moving figure he can barely see in the dark--just not quite as well as Nolan intended. Even though I didn't see The Dark Knight in IMAX, I was awed by cinematographer Wally Pfister's opening aerial footage of the Joker's accomplices proceeding with their heist. It looks spectacular even in standard 35mm.

The bank heist marks one of the few times we see sunlight in a Batman film, one of several touches that place Gotham in a more grounded reality and distinguish Nolan's Batman incarnation from previous screen incarnations. (Burton refused to have the sun appear during his rather backlotty and stagebound version of Batman. When he did shoot a scene in daylight, Burton chose to do it during a cloudy day.)

Another intriguing Nolan touch is the jettisoning of the more fantastical elements of Batman's adversaries, Scarecrow fear gas aside. I doubt the very sci-fi Poison Ivy would exist in Nolan's universe. (I'm not sure which villains should appear in the threequel, but I'd like to see Bale face off against Peter Sarsgaard--who happens to be married to Bale's Dark Knight co-star Maggie Gyllenhaal--or Parker Posey, not because of her performance in Superman Returns but her performances in Dazed and Confused, Henry Fool and Fay Grim.) A chick who can control plants with her mind just isn't as disturbing or formidable as Nolan and Ledger's interpretation of the Joker, who's portrayed here as less of a clown and fame whore a la Jack Nicholson and more of a terrorist who's attracted to anarchy like a dog is attracted to car windows it can stick its head through--to reference a key Dark Knight image of this creepy criminal without a code.

It's been reported that Ledger wasn't familiar with the Batman comics and graphic novels before he signed on to The Dark Knight. He based his Joker on the Droogs and Sid Vicious and downplayed the character's clownish persona. Those were interesting choices for his standout performance, which is heightened by some of the most intense and atonal music Hans Zimmer has ever written (as soon as I receive the Dark Knight score CD by Zimmer and James Newton Howard, I'll add some of its tracks to "Assorted Fistful" rotation on the Fistful of Soundtracks channel). It's the cleverest combo of star performance and original film score that I've seen on the big screen in a while: Ledger went punk for the Joker, as did Zimmer, whose punk-influenced Joker themes have been described by the L.A. Times as "an orchestral interpretation of a something created by Trent Reznor's Nine Inch Nails."

The Dark Knight is the first great summer movie since Do the Right Thing that's made me angry. How often can you say that about a piece of summertime entertainment? Nolan's film left me feeling pissed off about two things: the fact that there are no easy answers in this post-9/11 world--not since Justice League Unlimited's great Justice Lords and Cadmus storylines has a post-9/11 superhero show or film dared to bring its protagonists' tactics into question--and the fact that we won't be able to see any more mesmerizing performances from Ledger.