Besides being a well crafted story, the movie had more going for it in brilliant casting (with one very well liked actor having recently died), being shot in IMAX which encouraged those who saw it in regular theaters to see it in its enhanced form (which explained how two weeks later all IMAX shows were sold out while regular screens continued to do good business with word of mouth and IMAX spillover crowds), and of course parents who went to see the show ahead of time to see if it was age appropriate for their kids. All of this contributed to amazing numbers.

Too bad W couldn’t be a fictional character.

Batman is obviously Good, yet almost crosses to Evil. Dent is Good, and does cross to Evil. The innocent citizens on the barge vote to blow up the barge carrying the criminals. The criminal on the prison barge does Good by throwing the detonatot out the window.

Who is Good, who is Evil, and what would it take to get someone to cross that line?

C’mon - Bruce Wayne HIMSELF dons a bat suit and beats the stuffing out of criminals -

George W. Bush dons a flight suit and declares Mission Accomplished not even halfway out of his first term - and we’re still in the mindless trenches of Iraq.

There is no comparsion. It’s a piss poor analogy.

~

Coat

I thought Batman was considered ultra-conservative, and Green Arrow was radical?

Yes, Dweeze, it is an apt description, but that column appeared in the Wall Street Journal, not the New York Times!

I don’t know - seems a pretty apt description of the Bush Administration to me.

Nolan doesn’t like to give easy answers in his films and he leaves a lot up to the audience…but that doesn’t mean the -questions- he’s asking aren’t very clear or aren’t meant to indicate some very specific ideas.

While it’s clear from interviews that Nolan intended the spy system to be a regarded as a bad thing, and while Lucius is given a hero moment when he destroys the system, the rest of the way it is presented in the movie is certainly muddled enough to give someone who wants to argue that tough times are enough justification to suspend civil liberties something to hang their hat on.

As for family values, he is in love with a kitten with a whip

To be fair, everyone loves a kitten with a whip.

Redistribution of wealth, he is for and does so voluntarily
Big government projects he is for and will finance if the government cannot
Alternative families he is for and likes to take in youthful wards
he is anti gun and prefers strict gun control and will control them when the government fails to
As for family values, he is in love with a kitten with a whip

That kind of stuff just feels like seeing what you want to see, not really critically analyzing it at all.

Also, that article got one major thing wrong…the ad campaign with The Joker all over everything was in place long before Ledger died. Sure, they didn’t stop it after his death, but it wasn’t some ploy to exploit it either. I don’t think advertising needs defending most of the time, I just don’t like unnecessarily wrong info.

In the words of Hank Venture from last night’s episode of THE VENTURE BROTHERS…What would Batman do?

Now… can Batman, a person with so many demons, be good? Or does he sacrifice redemption or happiness by breaking laws for a greater good?

As for the Wall Street Journal article, well… Batman breaks the law everyday by being a vigilante who works above and outside the law with no oversight. Not the sort of person I’d compare with the president!

I can already see what the pundits will say about Watchmen in six months time…