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."

Tip-Top Quotables: Special Halloween Edition

(Photo source: DVD Beaver)

My favorite monthly section in old Source magazine issues was "Hip-Hop Quotables," in which the Source editors printed out their favorite new rap verse of the month, from the first bar to the last. "Tip-Top Quotables," which I've named after that Source section, is a collection of my favorite quotes of the week from anywhere, whether it's a recent TV show or a new rap verse. "TTQ" won't appear on this blog every week. It'll appear whenever the fuck I feel like it.

* "I worked harder on that probably than anything I'd done in my life, so I was really, really sad that it didn't find an audience when it came out. But then, over the course of 10 or 15 years, to see that it really did—it just was a slow-cooking thing—it was one of those really rare things that just took on a life of its own. It was incredibly gratifying. I've worked on many things that failed, and that, more than anything else at that point, was something that I really wanted people to find. But when it came out, nobody knew how to market it. Nobody knew what it was. It wasn't a marketable entity. But to Disney's credit, they saw that it was developing a following, and they sensed they could nurture that and make it have a second and third life. So really, kudos to them. To say, 'You know what? This thing has potential now, 10 years later. Let's feed it, let's nurture it, let's develop it more. Let's re-release it, let's do an 'inspired by' record.' They really did catch on after the fact. But at the time, it really was heartbreaking."--Danny Elfman on 1993's The Nightmare Before Christmas, the sixth of 842 feature films he scored for Tim Burton, A.V. Club

(AFOS programming note: "This Is Halloween" from The Nightmare Before Christmas can be heard during the annual AFOS Halloween night block "Buckets of Score," from 5pm to 11pm Pacific.)

* "Halloween is when every hack comedian's premises turn into costumes."--Hari Kondabolu

* "Do you know why we carve jack-o'-lanterns on Halloween? The origins of this curious tradition actually date back hundreds of years, to the early Puritan settlers in the American colonies. The Puritans believed that every Halloween, the Devil would enchant the pumpkins' faces so that they would come to life and say complimentary things about the legs of all the Puritan men, such as, 'Nice legs. Very muscular,' and 'Your legs are tremendous!' The man who got the most leg-based compliments from the jack-o'-lanterns would then be forced to spend Halloween in jail."--ClickHole, "Exploring The Origins Of 4 Halloween Traditions"

* "To increase blood pressure in the black community, we are adding sodium to sports clothing."--the Nixon Administration's '70s robot R.A.C.I.S.T. (Robotic Asynchronous Computerized Information System Two-Thousand), Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws! Or Finger Lickin' Chicken of the Sea"

* "Later, an interracial couple was attacked, but the shark did not eat the white girl. In fact, the shark even gave her a ride home."--R.A.C.I.S.T., updating President Nixon on the activities of a shark that attacks only black swimmers, Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws"

* "It's only a beach, Cream Corn. Just a big-ass bathtub with fish in it. And if you seen one big-ass bathtub with fish in it, you seen 'em all."--Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White), Black Dynamite, "Black Jaws" (true that, Dynamite; the beach is overrated as fuck)

* "I'm in love with chicken waings/Fuck them string beans/Gotta feel that hypertension/Tuggin' my heartstrings/And when I'm feelin' hungry/Start it off with ribs and fries/Ham hocks and bacon grease/Diabetic paradiiiiiiiiise!"--"Thick James" (Phonte), singing the "Mary Jane"-style "Chicken Waings" (composed by music supervisor Fatin "10" Horton) during Black Dynamite's "Black Jaws" end credits

Marry Me's Halloween episode

* Julie (Jessica St. Clair) to her son Mason (Jet Jurgensmeyer): "Well, you are in a lot of trouble, Mister, so you get inside and you start practicing that Mandarin."
Mason: "I wish Annie and Jake were my mom! [Proceeds to say to Julie a bit of Mandarin dialogue that's so shocking to her that she gasps]"
Jake (Ken Marino): "What does that mean?"
Julie: "'Die, white devil.' He's going through a phase."
--Marry Me, "Scary Me"

* "Wow, babe, you are just like Oprah. You don't have any kids of your own, but you tell everybody else what to do with theirs."--Jake (Marino), complimenting his fiancée Annie (Casey Wilson) on the advice she gave at the end of Halloween night to her arch-enemy Julie about kids, Marry Me, "Scary Me"

* "We have no idea how prevalent sugar is in almost everything that we eat. Look at Clamato juice, the original tomato cocktail with clam. One serving has 11 grams of sugar in it, so they clearly thought, 'Well, look, let's improve the taste by adding sugar,' instead of thinking, 'Let's improve the taste by removing the clam.'"--Last Week Tonight's John Oliver

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Every Monday and Wednesday this month, I'll be spotlighting a really good article about a Universal film or TV series that has original music featured in the "Ask for Babs" mix, my first DJ mix. I put together the "Ask for Babs" mix after finding out that Universal is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

From 2010, Spinoff Online's Graeme McMillan gives his reasons "Why Scott Pilgrim Is the Movie Comic Book Movies Should Model Themselves After":

There’s something that feels so fresh about the way that the movie uses every trick up its sleeve in service of the entire experience, in a way that other comic book movies tend to shy away from; when was the last comic book movie that was as enjoyable from an audible perspective as it was visual, you know? I don’t just mean sound effects or soundtrack – although, come on: Tim Burton’s Batman soundtrack aside, comic book movie soundtracks are almost all embarrassingly bad, especially in comparison to how strong Scott Pilgrim‘s is, and how important it is to the movie – but dialogue and performances, as well...

Comic book movies – and by that, I mostly mean superhero movies, because that’s the majority of the genre – end up leaning towards the stereotype of comic book writing, with epic themes expressed in fights and stilted dialogue. Maybe one of the reasons I liked Scott Pilgrim so much was that it had the fights – and what amazing, visually impressive fights they are – but they’re not so overpowering that everything else becomes filler, a generic “what happens in between”...

I mean, if I were being entirely honest, I’d love for it to make filmmakers think, “How can I make a movie that’s as exciting and funny and in love with movies and comics and wants to remind the audience to love them as well,” but I’m trying to rein in my hyperbole slightly here. But. But one of the reasons that I love Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World so much is that it transcends the notion of a comic book movie, and becomes a movie that just so happened to be a comic book first. If there’s anything that Marvel Studios, DC Entertainment and everyone else making comic book adaptations should be aiming for, it’s that.

I mean, I can dream, can’t I?

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

March Madness March of the Day: "Main Title" from Batman by Danny Elfman

(Photo source: Stefan the Cameraman)

In her 2004 book Danny Elfman's Batman: A Film Score Guide (wow, there's an actual book devoted to Elfman's Batman score?), Janet K. Halfyard wrote, "[Elfman's] theme is in a minor key and it is not actually a march, although it could be mistaken for one... as the theme enters in a more obviously militaristic manner, the pulse more than doubles [from MM70] to MM146, which is more of a gallop than a march."

So if you listen closely to certain sections of the 1989 Batman main title theme, they don't... Aw, who gives a shit? If its sound makes you want to march or go beat up a creepy clown, it's a march.

"Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds! Lawrence?": La-La Land reissues Danny Elfman's classic Batman score with additional cues

It's a great week to be a fan of the Batman movies. Christopher Nolan confirmed that Christian Bale will reprise his impression of Froggy from The Little Rascals for their third Batman installment together, and La-La Land Records announced yesterday that it's releasing an expanded reissue of one of my all-time favorite film scores, the rousing 1989 Batman score by Danny Elfman (his third feature-length score for the director he's worked with the most, Tim Burton). That score was a revelation for those of us who were more familiar with Elfman's Oingo Boingo joints than his film music or whose only exposure to his original scores was the Boingo-esque music he composed for the Sledge Hammer! opening titles, Beetlejuice and Midnight Run (I hadn't seen Pee-wee's Big Adventure yet). The Batman score introduced to us a whole new side to the man behind "Dead Man's Party," "Little Girls" and the Weird Science theme.

The two-CD set will debut as an exclusive goodie at La-La Land's booth at next week's San Diego Comic-Con shortly before the label makes it available to everybody on July 27. The reissue will contain an hour and a half's worth of previously unreleased material. Even the brief library music-style cue Elfman wrote for the Joker's Smilex commercial will make it to the expanded edition. The tracks I'm looking forward to the most are rejected cues like an alternate version of the main title theme.

I wonder what the Goddamn Batman would have to say about this eagerly anticipated release on his Twitter page. He'd probably tweet (in two parts, of course), "Threw away Robin's Twilight soundtrack CDs from the CD changer to make room for the never-before-released workout music Elfman wrote for me. Robin, your Twilight CDs are melting inside the Batcave furnace if you need them."

The Batsuit, back in the days before someone with a nipple fetish ruined it.

AFOS: "Collabs" playlist

Airing this Wednesday at 10am and 3pm on A Fistful of Soundtracks is the Fistful of Soundtracks: The Series episode "Collabs" (WEB43) from June 28-July 4, 2004.

The instrumental bed that plays during WEB43's opening segment is "Bolero" by Jazzelicious, from the Masterworks Reworked CD. I first heard the Jazzelicious cover of Maurice Ravel's "Bolero" during an episode of Nip/Tuck--back when the show was actually watchable--and I dug it so much I wanted to use it as a bed. The Jazzelicious track can also be heard during "The F Zone" on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on AFOS.

1. The Paramount Studio Orchestra, "Prelude and Rooftop," Vertigo, Varèse Sarabande
2. Nino Rota, "La Dolce Vita," Fellini & Rota: I Film, Le Musiche--Movies & Music, CAM
3. Ennio Morricone with Franco De Gemini and "The Modern Singers" of Alessandroni, "Man with a Harmonica," Once Upon a Time in the West, RCA
4. Henry Mancini, "Main Title from The Pink Panther Strikes Again," The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Rykodisc
5. Jerry Goldsmith, "Car Trouble," Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Varèse Sarabande
6. Carter Burwell, "Way Out There" (from Raising Arizona), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration, Varèse Sarabande
7. Joe Hisaishi, "The Legend of Ashitaka," Princess Mononoke, Milan
8. Danny Elfman, "The Growing Montage," Big Fish, Sony Classical/Epic/Sony Music Soundtrax
9. Danny Elfman, "Main Titles" (from Beetlejuice), Music for a Darkened Theatre: Film & Television Music--Volume One, MCA
10. Angelo Badalamenti, "Twin Peaks Theme (Instrumental)," Twin Peaks, Warner Bros.
11. Howard Shore, "Finale" (from The Fly), Varèse Sarabande: A 25th Anniversary Celebration, Varèse Sarabande
12. Terence Blanchard, "Fruit of Islam," Malcolm X: Original Motion Picture Score, 40 Acres and a Mule Musicworks/Columbia
13. Cliff Martinez, "Mr. and Mrs. Cliff," King of the Hill, Varèse Sarabande
14. John Williams, "End Titles," Raiders of the Lost Ark, DCC Compact Classics
15. City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, "End title," Henry V, EMI

The composer/director partnerships that were spotlighted in this ep are: Bernard Herrmann/Alfred Hitchcock; Nino Rota/Federico Fellini; Ennio Morricone/Sergio Leone; Henry Mancini/Blake Edwards; Jerry Goldsmith/Joe Dante; Carter Burwell/the Coen Brothers; Joe Hisaishi/Hayao Miyazaki; Danny Elfman/Tim Burton; Angelo Badalamenti/David Lynch; Howard Shore/David Cronenberg; Terence Blanchard/Spike Lee; Cliff Martinez/Steven Soderbergh; John Williams/Steven Spielberg; and Patrick Doyle/Kenneth Branagh.

Reruns of AFOS: The Series air Wednesdays at 10am and 3pm. To listen to the station during either of those time slots (or right now), press the play icon on the blue widget below the "About me" mini-bio on this blog.

Production design porn from the Topps Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine

Long before movie studios promoted their tentpole releases through elaborate sites or postings of HD trailers on Apple's trailer site ("Watch the Avatar trailer a day before its premiere in theaters or James Cameron will shoot a puppy!"), there were these things called official movie souvenir magazines that were exactly like the studio sites promotional material-hungry film geeks can click to nowadays. When I was a kid, either Starlog Press or Topps would devote an entire one-shot mag to an upcoming blockbuster and fill the mag with a spoilerrific photo summary of the movie, fluffy cast interviews, slightly less fluffy crew interviews and the only part of the mag I liked, behind-the-scenes pictures and concept art. Starlog Press did tie-in mags for the Star Trek, Rocky and James Bond franchises, while Topps focused on blockbusters that it produced trading cards for, like Tim Burton's Batman and Touchstone Pictures' wannabe Batman, the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy reboot.

Do mag publishers still put out official movie souvenir mags? I wouldn't be surprised if High School Musical: The Musical or whatever it's called recently had one.

In 1989, Batman was my favorite movie. Twenty summers later, uh... not so much. But both score music-wise and production design-wise, the film remains one of the most impressive from that decade. Production designer Anton Furst's bleak vision of Gotham City won him an Oscar and was so pitch-perfect for this incarnation of Batman that DC incorporated the late Furst's architectural designs into the early '90s comics.

Here are several interesting photos and drawings from my well-preserved copy of the 1989 Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, which I still like to occasionally leaf through even though the Pop Art-colored backgrounds and frothy late '80s fonts are a poor match with the photos from this darker-toned Batman movie--the mag looks like it was designed by the Saved by the Bell opening titles designer.


A visual effects crew member inspects the miniature Gotham set that was built for the Batwing attack sequence.


Was this where the Gotham Central police headquarters name and comic book series title came from?

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.