Well we survived Hell Week and got about 87% of what we had to get done, done, which is a good percentage. We even managed to sneak in the movies we had to see before Nerd Fest and everything got spoiled.
Our enjoyment of THE DARK KNIGHT on Saturday was somewhat hampered by a few elements:
1) We arrived late and had to sit in the 3rd row. Not the most relaxing place to sit.
2) For some unknown reason, the woman sitting next to us decided to bring an entire box full of stinky Chinese food to eat during the film. Stinky Chinese food full of stinky cabbage. And every once in a while, as the movie unfolded, she would open up the box and have a taste, sending new waves of stinky cabbage — now old and cold — into the theater. She also sat with it on her LAP the whole time instead of at least lowering it to the ground where the potential for damage was less.
Now don’t get us wrong, we’ve snuck food into the theater — we especially favor one of the sublime tuna salad sandwiches from Todaro Brothers, and, sure, that doesn’t smell like a bed of jasmine, but we eat the whole thing and it’s soon finished. Ultimately, if the Joker really were to come to Gotham, he could do worse than to demoralize the populace and ruin people’s joy by sneaking stinky Chinese food into theaters across the city.
3) — and this is the one that will get us into trouble — we didn’t think BATMAN BEGINS was the Dostoyevsky-level masterpiece most fellows think it was. It was perfectly fine and well done and well cast, but it was, in the end, a fine action movie.
THE DARK KNIGHT is more, to that we would agree, and, yes, almost surely the greatest superhero movie ever made, but it was too choppily edited to be a truly great film, no matter how strong the story and the performances. Anyway, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it, at least until we see it in IMAX in a week or so. It didn’t complete us, or send us into orbit, or make us want to rate it the #1 film of all time or anything like that. We kind of get why The Dark Knight generation feels that way, but maybe this is just not as much our thing.
That said, we do think this, from New Yorker reviewer David Denby is one of the dumbest things ever written:
In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle.
This from someone who thought the wretched HANCOCK was the best movie of the summer? What is in Denby’s water? What is in his Chinese food, even?
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HELLBOY II was a lot of fun, and the best demo reel for THE HOBBIT we could imagine. Even down to how [SPOILER]the crown MELTED at the end. It was a visual treat, a feast of imagination, and just a great time at the movies. Not much more to say than that.
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In other news, we’re going to TRY to slog through the last of the booth listings for the big show, and try to finish the laundry.
We received the following in our inbox and present without comment:
Amano! Mignola! Sakai! Way! Nightow! BRUCE CAMPBELL! Dark Horse has an incredible list of signings, raffles to win exclusive Domo figures, a full day of WETA signings, a full day of Star Wars signings and panels galore. Details are all in the jump.
