The Dark Knight of Oscars

Mrs. X and I sort of watched the Oscars last night. I say sort of, because we turned it off about halfway through and the first half, she was working on stuff on the computer and I was working on the taxes, so it was more background noise at many points.

Still, we did see some of the more interesting points. Honestly, we were really only interested in seeing if Heath Ledger would win for the Joker. I seem to be a real late comer to this party and I still stand by my original statement that as good as his performance was, I don’t think he would have actually won the award had he not died. Nothing against the performance but it has more to do with the Academy’s view of the superhero genre: these types of movies are allowed to win technical awards, but to treat them on the same level as the arthouse fare that generally wins would be beneath one’s dignity. Now, I must say that I haven’t seen any of the other performances, but my gut tells me that if Ledger had not died, the award may well have gone to Josh Brolin given how his performance in Milk was talked up at various points. But that is just my opinion.

Now, while I’m on the subject, I actually watched The Dark Knight for the first time on Friday. It was okay but in my opinion it was not the tour-de-force that many people seemed to make it out to be. It had great promise to start out. Unlike your traditional comic book movie, DK seemed to be trying to get back to its detective roots and not just make Batman some guy who beats up other people with neat gadgets for two hours. Even the introduction of the Joker with no worries about his backstory but just as a new player on the scene felt more authentic.

However, the movie tried to do too much. The introduction of Two-Face didn’t help and detracted from the confrontation with the Joker at the end of the movie. In fact, trying to maintain Harvey Dent’s profile and push the love triangle made the rest of the movie feel rushed. There should have been a lot less of this aspect and more savoring of reign of terror unleashed by the Joker. In many ways, this movie would have been well served to have been expanded into an HBO type miniseries. This format would have given a lot more time to appreciate some of the nuances of the overarching story.

There was only one other little aspect of the movie that I didn’t like and that was the whole “man is a noble creature” aspect that came up when the two ferries refused to blow each other up. I have a hard time believing that in the face of terror and death not a single person would give in and panic. Usually it only takes one person to start a panic and in that panic, someone would have detonated the bomb on the other boat. Perhaps I’m just overly cynical, but I’m still more inclined toward Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K outlook that while a single person may be intelligent and well-grounded, people as a whole are panicky, fearful, and irrational. It’s one of the reasons that the ship sinking scenes in Titanic are so believable: it shows how people will act in a true crisis. But that is a small nitpick in an otherwise acceptable movie.

Getting back to the Oscars, I believe Mrs. X has already put Slumdog Millionaire on our Netflix queue. It seems like it is a good movie and it would be the first Best Picture winner that I’m interested in seeing since Return of the King. I don’t know if she plans on putting any of the other nominees on the queue. I don’t really have an opinion of the rest and I’m not going to put any effort into seeing them, but I’m not going to say that I won’t watch them.

And at least, most of the political rhetoric was limited to Sean Penn and I had long since gone to bed by that point. Score one for me.