Asher, you philistine. Look, I hate comic book movies ten times as much as the next guy. No joke. They’re stupid 95% of the time. Seriously stupid. I sit in the theatre and roll my eyes and wonder what the deal is with the retards who write, read, and revere this stuff. And then I adjust my beret, sniff, and pick a piece of lint off my pressed slacks. But to try to tar Dark Knight with the comic book movie brush is just goofy. “No real insight”? “Titillates but never illuminates”? Dude.
It’s a movie about characters making difficult choices instead of just punching each other real hard. On that level alone, Dark Knight has more claim to a “serious” movie that most serious movies.
I think Dark Knight is pretty massively overrated(it’s got more endings than Return of the King, the pacing is frantic despite the film being overlong, the plausibility rating is like a 1.3, some of the speechifying is condescending), but when film’s big ending sequence is a conversation about hard choices and their consequences I think it can be treated as a serious movie.
Sin City isn’t serious in tone, it’s serious in subject matter.
The Matthau/Shaw version was pretty good. With Washington and Travolta, I’ll probably go see it (though honestly I could see them playing the opposite characters just as easily).
Marc Maron did a WTF episode with Jason Bailey where they talked extensively about Taking of Pelham One Two Three and New York City cinema in general. Great stuff.
I just wanted to post that before it went behind a paywall. The end of the episode played clips from a podcast for Fun City Cinema about Pelham One Two Three. Great stuff. I’ll have to check out that full episode too, and of course, watch this movie. I’ve seen the Denzel/Travolta remake, but haven’t seen the original yet.
Here’s the Fun City Cinema episode about this movie:
That podcast is also about The Warriors, which I also haven’t seen, so I’d better get on that!
I saw a thread pop up that I haven’t seen before, clicked on it and saw it was posted in 2008, and I knew before I even scrolled down that the threadsurrection was going to be a Rock8man production.
I do love resurrecting threads. I think it’s neat to go back in time and see what people were talking about. That’s another reason why mega-threads irk me when people just want to change the topic and keep talking in a single thread. I just want to say, oh my god you guys, do you know how long it would take me to read such a giant thread in the year 2031? You’re making it impossible!
