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• Tuesday, July 29, 2008 01:23 AM

  atkinson sounds like the kind of stuffy fossil who

  goes home and consoles himself with his recordings of the 'ring' and 'the magic flute.' no superpowers, hidden identities, or other idiotic confections for kids please!

  come on, aronofsky directing robocop is not exactly orson welles doing 'transformers: the movie.' i can very easily see how the guy who made the embarrassing 'pi' and 'requiem for a dream' -- a 2-hour d.a.r.e. commercial but with less character development -- ends up doing a robocop remake. he can't rely on "promise" forever. i'm excited too -- we'll get to see if he can tell a story and whether there's anything more to the flashes of (derivative) visual talent in those movies. (in fairness, i haven't seen 'the fountain.') let me be more precise -- i'm excited he's temporarily attached himself to his project. this is, after all, the guy who's talked about everything from 'batman' to 'lost' but couldn't even commit to doing a 1-hour episode of the latter.

  i guess i'll take the bait -- i thought 'dark knight' was great. yes, there is fair amount of clumsiness in the storytelling (not worse than, say, 'blade runner') and some badly staged action scenes. but the movie is propulsive and has great escalating emotion/horror and some great performances. and it wasn't nearly as talky as i was expecting, especially when it came to the joker (and unlike 'the killing joke,' for example, which might have the right idea but totally failed to dramatize it).

  i know critics like to imagine these summer audiences go to see shiny things and computer explosions, but if anything, batman and pirates of the caribbean: curse of the illegal chineses dvds prove that people can still be drawn in, in hordes, by great acting. time to cut all the supposed adolescents some slack.

  by the way, did someone say that they didn't understand why people go to see the dark knight when they can read 'crime and punishment'? really? are you shocked that people read other books about revenge besides 'hamlet'? that they buy a street map of dublin instead of 'ulysses'? i just think you might be setting the bar a bit too high

  —vermicious knid Read vermicious knid's other letters
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