The Dark Knight--and my critique of an idiotic review

It measures up to the hype.

Last night, Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I drove to the nearest multiplex to see the latest Batman film, The Dark Knight. It's a masterpiece. I could do a full-blown review, but I don't think many people come to this blog for movie appraisals. Also, unlike a certain film reviewer--I'll get to him later--I don't take myself so seriously.

Chicago has never looked better--or more menacing--in this film. Oops, did I say Chicago? I meant Gotham City. But most of The Dark Knight was filmed in Chicago, much of it inside and outside the old downtown post office in the city's West Loop. I used to work across the street from the art-deco monolith.

Did you like the car chase scene from The Blues Brothers on Lower Wacker Drive? Well, I guarantee you'll enjoy the one in this movie better. (By the way, how did they get that 16-wheeler down there?)

The late Heath Ledger is fabulous as The Joker, and I sound like a homer here, but watching an Australian play a killer clown with a Chicago accent was worth the price of admission for me.

Why so serious? That's one of the best lines from The Joker.

But now it's time for a sour note, albeit one that also has a Chicago accent. A couple of times in the film, The Joker is called a terrorist--an accurate epithet.

J.R. Jones is the chief film critic of The Chicago Reader, an alternative free weekly, the Village Voice for the Midwest.

Here is the opening paragraph in his Dark Knight review:

As the Bush era drags on, I seem to be developing an irrational hatred of summer blockbusters, those gas-guzzling, road-hogging, radio-blasting Hummers of the entertainment business. The fact that they get worse and worse and still make tons of money doesn't say much for the national character. New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently conjured up an image of Americans flocking to the movies this summer to escape their woes, as if we were all dust bowl farmers hoping to banish the Great Depression from our thoughts with flickering images of Clark Gable and Mickey Mouse. But while our leaders are waging preemptive wars, torturing innocent people to death, tossing out habeas corpus, and gutting the Fourth Amendment, we probably don't need to escape as much as the rest of the world needs to escape from us.

More...

Lest anyone miss the connection to 9/11 and the so-called War on Terror, Nolan has (Note...I edited a bit out for people who haven't seen the movie) an overhead shot shows a building that covers an entire city block collapsing into rubble. The Dark Knight may be a state-of-the-art popcorn movie, but its Gotham City is a fun-house-mirror image of America, its democratic institutions crumbling and its people perched between anarchy and totalitarianism.

Whoah! Who got up on the wrong side of The Daily Kos? Sometimes, J.R., it's just a movie. Let me repeat, sometimes, it's just a movie. Of course you probably call movies "cinema."

In his loathsome review, Jones issues a spoiler alert, but he apparently isn't aware, or just doesn't care, that people sometimes skim articles. Readers skim my blog posts. Jones gives away the ending of The Dark Knight. Sorry Jones-ey, but the world isn't hanging on every one of your words.

Why so serious?

Let me use my best Chicago accent to issue my opinion on Jones:

What a douchebag!

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