Taken at Muse in Marley Park on Wednesday evening. T’was a really good gig with the guys starting with ‘Map of the Problematique’ and finishing with ‘Knights of Cydonia’. ‘Feelin Good’ was sung by the whole place along with ‘Plug In Baby’ towards the end. The only crappy part of the evening was travelling to and from Marley Park. It took us an hour and twenty minutes from the city centre which meant we missed Kasabian. Boo-urns.
Have you ever danced with the Devil in the pale moon light?
If there’s one line from Tim Burton’s Batman that has stuck with me over the years then it’s that. Uttered by the Jack Nicholson’s Joker it epitomised the character in one line. Fast forward to 2008. After Christopher Nolan’s first foray into Gotham City with Batman Begins, the sequel has been anticipated like no other this year (bar Indiana Jones). The PR job has been fantastic and the film opened last week in the States with a record breaking 3 day tally.
So what did I make of it? As I mentioned last week, I took the time to catch up with Begins and I’m glad I did. The universe that Nolan has shaped is so expansive that you multiple viewings reveal details that would slip past you normally. In short, I loved The Dark Knight. With the majority of the characters and universe set up Nolan just goes all out. The film is two and a half hours long but it’s like a rollercoaster in terms of pacing. Ledger’s Joker is the epitamy of chaos. He wanders through the film killing without a thought and being a truly menacing figure. You fear him because he fears nothing. Ledger deserves to be nominated for his performance. Simple as.
The other new character is Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as Gotham’s new District Attorney. Darren loved his performance and believes it to be better than Ledger’s. I’ll need to see it a second time to decide but he runs him damn close. Dent is what Batman can’t be, a public figure to face down the mob in court. He’s prepared to stand up and try and bring his city back from the brink. His descent into madness in the third act, while a bit sudden, is tragic.
Christian Bale is excellent once again although the focus is on the newer characters. At the post movie beers I asked the question of ‘Where do you believe Gotham to be modeled on?’. The resounding answer was New York although I’ve always associated him with Chicago. I’m not sure why, I think it just “fits” better. I do associate Spiderman with New York though. One thing we all said was that we’d be seeing this movie again. There’s simply too much to take in first time around and that’s where this film will race away from its rivals in monetary terms. If you haven’t seen it then you should.
Blogging budies there on Tuesday night were:
A big thanks to movies.ie for providing the tickets.
I haven’t talked about this on the blog yet but I won tickets to ‘The Dark Knight‘ premiere on Tuesday night. Myself, Darren and Darragh had all been dieing to get tickets and, unfortunately, Darren didn’t get his own set so he’s taking my spare one. I know another mate of mine who would probably bite my hand off to go but Darren put me on to movies.ie in the first place so the ticket is his.
As prep for Tuesday I bought ‘Batman Begins‘ on DVD last week. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t got it in my collection already but it came in a 2 DVD pack with ‘Batman - Gotham Knight’. I only saw Begins the once when it was in the cinema so it was nice to refresh my memory. I was paying so much attention that I even spotted Risteard Cooper from Apres Match playing Captain Simonson. 
‘Gotham Knight’ on the other hand is a collection of 7 animated stories which go some way to bridge the gap between ‘Begins’ and ‘The Dark Knight’. They’re all really impressive but the stand out one for me was ‘Deadshot’. I found it on Youtube but I’m not too sure how long it’ll last. You can enjoy it below in two parts:
Got this from travors. The music I listen to from last.fm:
You can get your list here and then put it into Wordle here.
Last night, courtesy of the good people at Movies.ie (sign up now, there’s free stuff and they’re sound), I saw Wall-E. Anybody who’s a regular reader here (all two of you) know that I was really keen to see this. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve loved every movie that Pixar have produced and have them all on DVD. You may think that that has coloured my review of Wall-E but, as excited as I was to get tickets, I tried to be as objective as possible.
The film opens on an earth strewn with rubbish. Wall-E has been tasked with cleaning it up (along with hundreds of other such models) but alas he is the only one left of his kind. There is precious little “dialogue” in the first twenty minutes as Wall-E explores the rubbish piles and picks out souvenirs which he collects for his home. Shortly afterwards EVE arrives on Earth and Wall-E falls head over heels in love. I’m astounded by how Pixar can infuse their characters with such identifiable traits. The guys there really understand their craft and it’s a joy to see animated characters convey emotion as convincingly as this. As the plot thickens during the film, the pace rarely lets up as you’re introduced to human characters aboard the space ship Axiom. The human characters don’t have the same depth as the robots but I think that’s deliberate considering where the focus needs to be. What we do see of them though is highly entertaining, especially the scene involving them being knocked out of their hover chairs en masse.
I’m at pains not to reveal too much of the plot but I guarantee that you will be laughing and smiling throughout the duration. This is a modern animation classic and I will be seeing it more than once over the course of its cinematic run.
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