A Dark and Stormy Knight

When I went to the movies Thursday afternoon, it was to see The Dark Knight again, this time in IMAX. I had wanted to see an art film, something that wouldn't come to Alameda, but San Francisco let me down on that one, as usual, for the time frame that I had. I really wanted to go to the Castro Theater to see The Exiles, but there was no matinee. I too often go to the movies and see crap, because that's all that's ever playing, but I need better films to come to my theater, because I am lazy.

Unlike seemingly everyone else in the entire world, I do not think The Dark Knight is the greatest movie ever made; anyone who does is just being willfully ignorant. I'm pretty sure I don't even think it's the best superhero movie ever made. I don't even know if I could say that I like it better than Tim Burton's Batman from 1989.

But on my second viewing, I did like it better than the first time and IMAX is a pretty great way to see it. Since only some of it was shot in IMAX format, the film only took up the entire screen during those scenes. The gigantic size did not make up for the tedium of the last forty minutes of the film or the pretentiousness of the dialogue throughout or how seriously everyone involved seemed to take the whole overblown enterprise. But the best action scenes were enhanced, that's for fucking sure.

Still, I will never understand why we're not allowed to actually see the action in action films these days. Very often there are so many close shots that are cut together so quickly, that all sense of dynamics, physics and causality are lost. Look at, say, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which is relatively recent) or The Empire Strikes Back or even T2, or Bullitt, or just about anything made before the last ten years and compare the shooting and cutting of the action scenes to any of today's blockbusters. A lot of shit takes place in wide shots where you can actually see that your heroes are in danger, rather than closeups that telegraph this information with a grimace and a flash-pan, as is the trend today.

Michael Bay's Transformers may have set a high water mark for this kind of incomprehensible shooting strategy; Dark Knight is not nearly such a problem and much of the action is shot quite well. It may be that, when Nolan runs out of ideas, it's more obvious because other moments are so kinetic or graceful. There were too many scenes in which he swirls the camera furiously around two characters talking with gruff intensity at each other, which seems like a cheap attempt to cancel out cheesy, self-important dialogue with false urgency. How about just cutting the fucking scene? No one would miss it, dude.

In my opinion, if you want to see a recent film that gets it fucking-A right, that exemplifies the balance of mise-en-scene and montage necessary for a pure cinema of kinesis, as I refer to it, (usually but not always in reference to the "action" genre), it's Quentin Tarantino's half of Grindhouse, his mock-sexploitation feminist revenge-fantasy car-racing movie, Death Proof. Setting out to make a B movie, QT fails spectacularly at it because he's a cinematic virtuoso who can't help but do it right, even when he claims he's trying to do it wrong. The rest of these guys need to go back to school.