Day 27 (23.vii.08)
Woke up ridiculously late, and didn’t really get all that much done in the remainder of the day either. I sent off the postcards, and took the opportunity to buy myself a ticket for Batman Begins at 18:45, as a sort of light midweek entertainment. I mooched around the room wishing it would stop raining so that I could go and do some proper tourism, but instead ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos, mainly of Omid Djalili and Phill Jupitus, over lunch, followed by the reading for tomorrow’s lecture, during the latter half of which I also sustained an extended chat with Dhan S about what both of us had been up to over the last couple of days. The reading was a couple of chapters out of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, which apparently sets out to discuss in more fundamental detail some of the major concepts we’ve been looking at over the last few weeks, such as Locke’s state of nature, the merits of Rawlsian ideals of distributive justice, and so on. I say ‘apparently’ because after the preface I soon lost track of what Nozick was trying to argue in a large sea of side-discussions – yet again, it’s the lecturer who will have to ride to the rescue.
So, at 18:30 I set off for the Cineplex cinema at the top of the Manulife Centre for The Dark Knight; anyone who hasn’t seen it be careful when reading below, but I don’t think there are any real spoilers, even very mild ones… The trailers aside (which are often my favourite part of the film), all of which were slightly sci-fi oh-my-god-the-world’s-going-to-end kind of things (Watchmen, Terminator: Salvation, The Day the Earth stood still…), I was deeply unimpressed by the Canadian equivalent of pre-film adverts, all of which seemed to revolve around highly calorific food as their main object of interest. The film itself? My word. I’d read several reviews that demanded a posthumous Oscar for Heath Ledger’s performance in the past week or so, and they are absolutely right. There are three main levels of acting, delivering the lines plausibly, delivering the lines convincingly, and becoming the character. Most actors at school level do the first, some from uni level upwards and most professionals do the second, but only a minuscule elite managed the third, and then often only in selected roles. Johnny Depp, especially as Captain Jack Sparrow, is probably my all-time favourite in this category, followed by Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, Marlon Brando as Vito Corleone, Hugo Weaving as V, and Ian McKellen as Gandalf. Now I’m going to add Heath Ledger as the Joker to that list, as far as I’m concerned – a true meteor, and it’s plain unfair on humanity that we shall never know what heights he might have attained.
In short, while the film is rightly being lauded as ‘redefining what comic-book movies can be’, a dig which I would heartily aim at such disastrous flops as Ultraviolet or wide-eyed campfests like most of the Spiderman series, but something with which I would credit films at the gritty end of the spectrum such as Iron Man or deliberate riptakes like (apparently) Hancock, it is Ledger who adds the extra star on the review to turn it from ‘good way to spend an evening’ to ‘must-see’. Gary Oldman and Christian Bale are at least as good as they were in the first movie (Batman Begins), but here they are reduced to supporting cast. And while the film raises moral questions that learned scholars of philosophy have yet to find an answer to, we shouldn’t forget that the real approach we should take to Dark Knight is perhaps best captured by a phrase that has all the makings of a ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ or ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’; of course, it’s the Joker’s catchphrase… ‘Why… so…serious?‘
