The Dark Knight

In the immortal words of Public Enemy, "Don't Believe the Hype." I went to see this movie opening weekend with pretty high hopes. I like Batman Begins, I like Christopher Nolan, I like most of the actors in the movie, but the movie just didn't do it for me. And the hype and praise for the movie is driving me crazy. It hit #1 on imdb's Top 250 pretty quickly and I figured it would drop down over the next few days, but now 13 days later it is still there.

It is a decent movie, but there is no way that it is the best movie ever. The acting was good but there is no way any of it was Oscar worthy. If Heath Ledger wasn't dead, people would be laughing at the fanboys claiming he deserves an Oscar. It's sort of like when John Wayne won an Oscar for a crap movie because he was on his death bed, the only difference is John Wayne had a long distinguished career and probably deserved an Oscar at some point in it.

The movie itself wasn't bad, actually it was pretty good. Heath Ledger was probably the best version of The Joker I have seen, Christian Bale is a pretty damn good Batman. But the movie was too long, and too slow. I feel like they could have easily cut 45-50 minutes out of the movie. It didn't take too long before I started checking my watch and shifting around in my seat. By the time I thought it started to get good towards the end I had pretty much lost interest.

But obviously I am in the minority on this one. $300 million dollars in 10 days, and about $10 million a day on the weekdays since then. I won't be surprised if it takes in more than Titanic, it's over half way there already.

Youth Without Youth

When I heard that Francis Ford Coppola had a new movie coming out I was pretty stoked. The theaters around here don't get a lot of smaller movies, and this was no exception. It played from about a week and I didn't know it was playing until the last day it was here. I couldn't wait for it to come out on video so I could get it from Netflix. I finally got it this week, and it was pretty horrible. I'll give his next movie a shot, but I think it could be time for him to hang up the director hat and stick to producing his daughter's movies.