Movie: "The Dark Knight"

Well done, but all-in-all a very unpleasant movie. Perhaps it is a reflection of the times we live in where corruption seems to run rampant and even upstanding citizen-soldiers can be corrupted with threats and intimidation. Corruption is always present of course, but the extent of it varies. Sometimes it is tamped down to the point where even a little scandal is big news. Sometimes it flares up to the point where a new household name connected to a scandal is just more of the same, like now.


My memory failed me on the batmobile. I was sure it was a real military prototype that had been co-opted by the film makers for this movie. My son assured me that no, it was a special for the movie, and had actually been used in the previous movie as well. A little more information from my son, and (whipper-snapper can't be right, this is my area of expertise, not his) some research on the web reveals that this is the case. Turns out that the story in the previous movie was that it was a military prototype. So my memory was right about the origins, it just failed to distinguish fact from fiction. Give me a break, it was two years ago.

There were two comments from the Joker that stuck in my mind. One was that he claimed to be more impulsive than a careful planner, but almost everything that happened required a good deal of advance preparation. All of his attacks could have been pulled off within a day or so, but only if a good percentage of the population was totally corrupt, of a criminal bent, or insane. There certainly were a lot of them in the movie.

The other comment was that gasoline and bullets were cheap. Even at four dollars a gallon, gasoline is still one of the cheapest tools of destruction available.

Target practice with a centerfire firearm can get expensive, depending on many hundred's of rounds you expend. But a single bullet aimed with destructive intent can cause untold damage, and being as people are our most valuable assets, killing a person can be a catastrophic loss. Of course, some people, like the Joker, would show up in society's ledger in red ink, indicating a deficit, not an asset.

And don't confuse Christian Bale (Batman) with Christian Slater (not Batman).