Dark Knight Quiz #1: What's wrong with this picture?

So, from this clip we're to assume the buses allow a space for another bus to emerge from a destroyed wall, then the cop cars look like they're turning into the hole in the wall. Looks like there's a traffic light right where the wall of the bank ought to be. Hmm...

At the moment you're involved in the movie, it's a "wow" as the bus pulls out with perfect timing to blend in with the rest. But a few seconds later your mind calls "bull$&!^" as you realize a) How is the back of the bus not bashed in from busting through a cement wall? b) How does the driver of the bus behind this one not notice it's trailing debris and just drove out of a building? c) *Maybe* you can chalk up the timing of the passing buses to the Joker having scoped the schedule (since he does look at his watch in the bank just before the bus barrels through), but the perfect gap too?

As they say on the Internets, I see what you did there.

Ultimately, though, I think that the plausibility of the setpiece is less important than its thematic purpose; to establish The Joker as a glitch in the pattern, the break in the routine, the chaos lurking in the illusion of order. In that context, I can accept the mechanics of his escape here just as I can accept Chow Yun Fat's flying leaps in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I don't really see the big deal or why you went out of your way to post something like this. Do you really have that much free time on your hands?

The Joker uses buses throughout the film; the hospital scene? I just assume he acquired the whole fleet with the mob money he just stole. Told goons he was robbing a bank and he'd give'em a cut for driving the buses. I dunno, doesn't seem all to important to me.

But I do like the camera trickery of this shot. You never actually see the building, just the bus rolling away from rubble. Very neat.

This is an odd blog entry. If Jim is going to criticize the Dark Knight, he should focus on the SF features, such as the "BatPod" and the "City-Wide Cell-Phone Sonar Supercomputer" thingy.

The "Bus Escape" is merely implausible compared to many of the other elements in this SF movie.

Focusing on the implausible over the outrageous seems pedantic.

I think the people across the street not giving a damn, asks for suspension of belief.

I don't believe school buses EVER have to ride in a line like that. So I deduce part of the plan was to have a few goons wait outside with school buses, and start driving at a VERY specific time?

It feels very hollywood--villain disappears into the crowd, never to be found.

My problem with this film is that there are no characters, only caricatures. The most one dimensional of them all, Joker, is the only remotely authentic person on screen. He's allowed to just be, while everyone else feels like there's an agenda hanging over their heads. Especially Dent, who I believe was suppose to be the big emotional aspect.

There are too many things wrong with the shot to count. Some of them include that the back on the bus has no damage, the timing of the buses, lights and cops is too perfect, the other buses would have said "wtf?!" and alerted the cops, and the entire set-up does not fit with the Joker's persona of "making it up as he goes". This would have taken months of planning.

Much of the rest of the movie has the same problem. It's not that the movie is phsically unrealistic (that's a given in a comic book movie), but it's that the scenes with the Joker are unrealistic compared to what his character should be doing. I belive that DK generally got a free pass on these shortcomings due to the death of Heath Ledger. If it was not for that, much of the movie would have been criticized as laughable.

Mike seems to have caught it all, though I might add it's odd that none of the people on the sidewalk would be gawking at the spectacle. And it all does seem to pose a threat to the scene's credibility. Jack Fear's justification works fine for me and fairly deftly undercuts what I assume to be the blog post's implications.

huh?
stone building w/ tons of wood falling off?

The bus goes into the bank, when? When the other buses are stopped at the red light? Then there shouldn't be a gap for this bus to move in.

The bus goes into the bank, when? Earlier? Then the gap is a stroke of unbelievable luck.

The bus stays in the bank, how long? At least a minute, right? No one notices the explosion the breaking of the wall, the shooting, no crowd?

The bus comes out and joins the caravan, just as the cops arrive? And with the previous bus driver not (seemingly) batting an eyelid?

The bus is undamaged? (as the previous poster points out)

Wooden thingies fall off the bus? Whoa!?

I believe I mentioned this specific scene during my original takedown of "The Dark Knight", when you posted "Under cover of The Dark Knight". I listed it among my glitches that nagged at me through the movie (not that this was the only reason I didn't think the film was some sort of masterpiece).

What I remember most from TDK is Maggie Gyllenhaal's rushed death, following by five minutes of me thinking, "Hey, they just killed Maggie Gyllenhaal. Why is the movie still going?"

I'd like to see that sequence analyzed.

As for Chicago on film, I never thought about visiting there until I saw "I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With."

My partner and I were "wowed" in the theater, but when we watched it at home recently, it left a bad taste in our mouths.

As we watched it, we picked apart problems such as this through the whole movie.

For example, in the Hong Kong sequence, Batman is standing on a ledge of a skyscraper. The floodlights, rather than facing the building, are facing away from it. Batman is standing behind the floodlights, yet the building is covered with his shadows.

In the same sequence, Alfred's cell phone takes out the electricity in the building. What's-his-name's bodyguards are all sitting at a conference table, like they're at a meeting, when the lights go out. All of them then stand up, in the dark, and turn on flashlights they're holding. How many meetings have you attended where everyone just happens to be holding flashlights in their laps?

Riddled with flaws, saved by Ledger and Eckhart. No surprise it's been overlooked in so many awards categories.

However, we were mightily impressed with Nolan's use of Chicago. Yes, it's definitely Chicago, but with his creative and unusual use of exteriors, a native Chicagoan would also have to admit that it looks like a Chicago she/he has never seen before. It's like a dream of Chicago--real, yet unreal at the same time. Clever.

To say the picture doesn't work because you've noticed one early scene that introduces a character is somewhat implausible (and only after reviewing it several times I might add) is quite an overstatement.

From your headline and intro I was expecting a 10 point list of elements that blew the film for you, but all I got was a bus that didn't get noticed? Common!

JE: I intend to start small and build up.

Is it the fact that, on medium-close inspection, the bus seems to be emerging from a wooden shanty constructed on the very edge of the curb?

Or the fact that those pursuant police cars look to be careening into the bank at a good 30 MPH? Clearly there's another road or driveway there, just barely concealed by clever shot-blocking...?

Regardless, this shot really bothered me in the theater. I wholeheartedly agree with 'Jack Fear' that the bus managing to reenter the lineup - as perfectly as it does - is implausible but at least acceptable within the thematic bounds of what "The Dark Knight" is trying to do (The Joker transcending the system, etc.). But the entire movie, and this scene especially, has this subtle way of abusing your notions of spatiality and geometric logic. Not even to mention its plot, which manages to stay on *just* the wrong side of cohesive for a good 2.5 hours. It's not at all as ridiculous and egregious as the latest Micheal Bay joint, but if anything, it ends up even more baffling and discomfiting because its hazy incongruities stay in the background, accumulating silently until, by the end, your brain is liable to pop like an overheated TV dinner.

The first time, under the full duress of an IMAX presentation, I found "The Dark Knight" pretty amazing. The second time through, though, it felt pretty dispensable in every way. Ah, but maybe it's both. Perhaps the real genius of the movie lies in how its flaws can be folded back into the movie as strengths. Being that it's obsessed with chaos and the dissolution of order, it could be argued that the movie's anarchic progression is simply part of the whole point. I've often argued the same of guys like De Palma and especially Verhoeven (De Palma uses misogyny to explore it, "Starship Troopers" is about fascism by being fascist... that sort of thing). But why, in the case of "The Dark Knight," does it feel like giving the movie *way* too much benefit of the doubt? Why does it feel like Nolan and company are just using The Joker as a conceptual excuse to be as undisciplined and inchoate as they please?

- The bus actually enters the bank by crashing through the door which could likely be located near an intersection.
- Perhaps the joker hired a crazy or two to work as bus drivers. His exit is simply from the bank heist, we discover that his crime spree is long from over.

It is all quite the stretch, but I think it works within the context. For a guy who "doesn't make plans", the Joker seems to be Gotham's #1 employer for all the help he needs in his scheming.

The back of the bus is not clear enough to see whether the bus is damaged in any way. The point is that the Joker uses a school bus to getaway. Even if the driver from the bus behind him feels something being out of place, how many of us really immediately makes the connection that this is the same bus related to a bank robbery or even if there is a bank robbery going on. There are a 100 different things that could not happen the way it happens in the film but there is one possible way that it could have worked the way it is shown. Give me one other scene in one other action movie and I can show you 10 different ways it could not have happened. I happen to agree with the point Emerson makes that the movie is cut way too much in the sense that it jumps from a scene before you are completely into it. But that does not make it a bad movie. Its just not a great movie. Its a good movie that could not slow down to let the audience catch up with it.

Seriously Jim, is this how you spend your time?

JE: Yes. It's what film critics do.

Yeah, it's ridiculous. But - while I'm not the biggest "Dark Knight" fan -

I once saw a movie about a guy to wanted to murder his wife. After reading in the paper that an old cop friend of his is afraid of heights, he decides to invent a fictional supernatural backstory involving an obscure but real historical figure. He then coaches a woman (/his mistress; I'm never quite sure) on how to act possessed and persuades the cop to follow her around in hopes he'll become smitten with her. He then murders his wife and throws her off a tower, avoiding being seen by the cop he assumes won't be able to climb the stairs. At no point is the cop or any family member of the wife asked to identify the body, which would give the whole game up in an instant.

Ridiculous, right? But "Vertigo" is often called a Great Film.

The fact is that any film you want, if scrutinized close enough, can be found with all sorts of flaws. Along with that Vertigo film, Hitchcock also made a film about a man who dressed up as his mother to murder women he was attracted to. That sounds like the plot to either a Z grade horror film, or one of the greatest films ever made. It all depends on whether or not we are willing to accept the contrivance or not. If you love a movie, if you get really emotionally involved in it, you will over look such things as the bus pulling out of a building and nobody noticing. Watch any movie. The mistakes are there. It is just up to you to notice them.

If you will allow me this indulgence (it has been many years and I have forgotten the names of most of these websites), I recalled reading a review trashing all of the continuity errors in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, siting it as vastly inferior to the first two. However, upon checking this website, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was listed as the film with the most continuity gaffs in history. The person simply wanted to see the mistakes in PoA.

Two things:

1) The Joker's quip about not making plans is clearly a lie, as so many of the situations he involves himself with (the heist, the truck chase, the hobo-with-bomb-in-stomach-escape) CLEARLY come from someone who plans extensively. Remember that when he's saying that, he's trying to lure Dent to the dark side.

So, the most likely explanation is that:

The Joker has drivers in the fleet, he cell phoned 'em right before he left, they got into position, and then they all drove away.

The only thing the moment really needs to address is the utter lack of gawking pedestrians and stopped cars. But at this point in the film, Nolan and co. are trying to set us up for their attitude toward the Joker: crazy as he might be, he's got it all figured out.

JE: I might buy this -- obviously, the punch line is the shot before this one and we're not meant to think about it too much, especially the first time we see the movie -- if it weren't for the addition of schoolchildren's voices to the soundtrack. Isn't that meant to imply that these are actual schoolbusses? When I looked at the script, I thought the kids' voices was perhaps intended to substitute for a shot that is not in the film:

EXT. SCHOOL, GOTHAM -- DAY
Kids pour out, heading onto a long line of school buses.

INT. BANK -- CONTINUOUS
As the bus pulls out, the purple thread PULLS THE PIN -- hostages scream and scurry away from the Bank Manager, who shakes with fear as, with a FIZZ, the grenade does not explode, but SPEWS RED SMOKE.

EXT. BANK -- DAY
The School Bus pulls free of the Bank wall and pulls out onto the street, SLIDING INTO THE LINE OF IDENTICAL BUSES HEADING PAST THE BANK. The buses trundle past COP CARS racing up the street...

I think that this shot captures my basic problem with TDK.

Last week I had the chance to see Tim Burtons 89' "Batman" movie. While it's a completely insane movie, it makes no real attempt at assuming reality when it presents it's various situations. Chris Nolan's movie, on the other hand, attempts to bring the viewer as close as possible to accepting all these situations as realistic.

The shot shown here is absurd for reasons mentioned by previous posters (bank and streetlight oddly placed, back end of bus lookin' sharp, cop car with no siren, and a perfectly timed fleet of buses to slip into). But Nolan keeps things in "reality" by reducing the soundtrack to a minimum, using only one shot with no CU of the Joker, and even the lack of police siren lends to the detached feel. I'm not sure how the Joker planned his getaway, but it's no subtler than Burton's Joker throwing a parade downtown. Wouldn't a giant fleet of buses be easy to follow? Wouldn't the police have been notified of the offending bus (after all it back INTO a bank)? How often to we see a great fleet of school busses clipping along downtown Chicago? I live in Chicago, and I can tell you: not often. None the less, the idea of a school bus smacks of reality. It's an everyday sight, and the Joker has refrained from painting it up crazy or putting a loudspeaker system on the top to notify everyone of his presence.

Small details are amiss and inexplicable, but the simplicity of the shot, and it's refusal to indulge in melodramatics keeps us from asking obvious questions.

I'm confused at the issue. This shows The Joker is so calculating that he knows to time the bank robbery so that the bus would exit the same time as school gets out in Gotham. Thus, there would be hundreds of school buses in a row, driving down the street... possibly even coming from a high school down the street from the bank.

You guys have picked up on things I hadn't even thought of. My biggest problem with this shot -- as a shot -- is the way it cheats actually showing us the bus emerging from the bank (by starting off close to the bus and craning back and up). This is a big-budget spectacle. I wanted to see that. It would have helped with the geography/integrity of the shot, too. It's semi-satisfying that we're out of the bank now and, in one unbroken take, can see the Joker escape even as the cops arrive. In order to be truly satisfying -- even if it makes no real sense -- I think we need to actually see where the bus has been and how it dislodges itself and then "disappears" into the choreography of traffic flow. From this shot, ostensibly of a corner, we don't see the exterior bank wall the bus comes out of, because it's around the corner, outside frame right. Nolan has a real problem with coordinating physical space, which is why so much of the swooping and falling and chasing later in the movie feels piecemeal rather than building momentum. This wasn't the first or last time I wished the David Fincher of "Zodiac" was directing "TDK"...

First I'll reinforce my thoughts that, as much of a cheat as this shot kinda is, I think it's more or less okay, if less than it could have been. What I should mention, though, and this is speaking as a moderate fan of the film, that I'm quite enticed about picking this thing apart here. No one's done it yet and, let's face it, it's waiting to be done.

I think, to an extent, that it's a great film. But it's full of holes. As someone who likes the space that the holes go through, I would like to explore them better.

I'm kind of conflicted. Having seen "The Dark Knight" several times, I've found that it holds up remarkably well to repeat viewings. If anything, I've come to believe that the film is under-rated, that it received so much attention due to Heath Ledger's performance that many people almost forgot how well-made, intelligent, and yes, coherent, the whole production was.

And yet, it's obvious that this shot demands a certain suspension of disbelief, which I have no trouble within this context. I feel that Nolan and crew created such a sense of realism and believability that I was perfectly comfortable with them breaking the rules here and there. I'm curious to see the next entries in this series of blogs, but I seriously doubt that they will do anything to change my opinion of the movie.

I guess what strikes me the most is the profound subjectivity of film. Specifically, I think it's kind of amazing that you wished "TDK" was directed in a manner not unlike that of "Zodiac". As much as I admire much of the work of David Fincher, I thought "Zodiac" was a tremendous misfire, easily among the worst films of his career. I thought the pacing was laborious, the "point" nonexistent, and the overall experience profoundly unsatisfying. I thought it was a great-looking film that had nothing beneath the surface. How interesting we would watch the same two films and leave them both with such opposing views regarding their quality.

"a) How is the back of the bus not bashed in from busting through a cement wall?"

I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cement wall. It was through an actual entrance to the bank. What the bus broke into were the doors.

As for the perfection of everything, I assumed the character had the line of buses under his command. As someone pointed out, he uses more school buses later on, does he?

Anyhow, I'll consider this a filler entry, really, since I don't see any great problem with this shot whatsoever or to be of any great importance. I'm expecting, however, for the innefective Joker-scene in which he kills a mobster with a knife to be in order next.

If you analyze any scene, especially in an action movie, close enough, you will find tons of flaws. That isn't to say that a film can completely throw plausibility out the window, but if you have to continuously analyze the scene on DVD, as well as cross reference it with the script, I'd say it really isn't flawed. There may be flaws, but only people looking for them will find them.

"...if it weren't for the addition of schoolchildren's voices to the soundtrack. Isn't that meant to imply that these are actual schoolbusses? "

Watching "Dark Knight" again recently on BluRay, I noticed that despite the sound of children on the soundtrack, the school busses were empty . Could this lend credence to the idea that the other busses were being driven by henchmen?

Despite minor flaws like this (minor compared to the disorientation during the sonar visuals near the end), I remain impressed with the craftsmanship of the film. Take, for example, the detail involved in the gadget Batman uses to bend the barrel of a rifle and attempts (and fails) to cut through the side of the Scarecrow's van. At first viewing, it appears that bending the barrel requires supernatural strength on the part of Batman. Instead, this gadget, his suits vulnerability to knives, and his "sonar" vision failing at a key moment during his fight with the joker all seem to be part of a theme in the film of Batman's limits. I admire the way event the gadgets used in the film were incorporated into the story-telling instead of simply being used as cool visuals.

I think the information in the film is there to decipher what is happening. The flawed action moments are only flawed because when viewed by the average viewer in real time, it is difficult to follow. Unfortunately, in places, that information is available only to people willing to watch shots in slow playback or frame-by-frame. The "Dark Knight" is still superior in this respect to other action films of last year like "Quantum of Solace".

JE: Could it be that the addition of the children's voices on the soundtrack were to save money on extras that day -- to leave us with the impression that they are full of kids even though they are not? Because superhero fans aren't the type to look closely at the movie once it's on DVD... right? I don't think the movie is full of sleight-of-hand, but not well-executed enough to do what it's supposed to do, which is to direct your attention away from what's really going on. Take a look, for example, at how we're introduced to Commissioner Loeb (the only character we've never met whose fingerprints wind up on the Joker's card, thus marking him as a murder target); or the set up to the big truck chase sequence on "Lower Fifth" that begins with a cop shooting from a truck, a burning fire truck, and a garbage truck -- none of which have been linked previously. Or the astonishing chain of events in which the Joker is arrested, put in a holding cell for observation, de-cuffed by Commissioner Gordon, beat up by Batman, and then inexplicably left alone (still uncuffed) with another cop, who the Joker baits with lies and predictably overpowers, leading another cop to toss him a cell phone so he can set off a bomb he's planted inside an arrested henchman that could just as well have been one or both of the time bombs set up for Rachel and Harvey Dent (because we've never heard of bombs being set off by cell phones before, have we?)... Every moment is more idiotic than the last. (Oh, and if you're wondering why Harvey knocks over a container of inflammable fluid and rubs One Side of his face in it, well, it's so that will pay off in the most unlikely (and awkwardly filmed) way just after he is rescued and is suddenly transformed into...

Jim,

I had this same impression about Batman Begins. Maybe the hype makes us take a more critical look at the plot, characters, details -- and then upon this closer inspection, it doesn't hold up.

I didn't think Batman Begins was that good of a film. It shook the franchise out of the direction it was headed, but it wasn't a masterpiece. (My "school bus" moment in BB was around the ridiculous water-boiling machine at the end. Why didn't it boil the water in people?)

I think this genre is difficult to criticize consistently. Where do you draw the line on the suspension of disbelief? Apparently you drew this line on page 6 of the script.

And I'm right there with you, partner.

Wow, what a sad, sad existence you and Stephanie Zacharek lead...

I'm less interested in the incoherence of TDK (I have seen the film three times and this only served to cement it's overall discordant presentation) and more interested in the defensiveness of my fellow Scanners readers. Why is it so important for this film to be accepted? Where does this fear of deconstruction come from? What is about THIS movie, that makes it so beyond reproach?

I have several theories on this subject, but my best one is drawn from a quote from TDK. Michael Caine, as Alfred, is engaging in a bit of expository dialogue, spoken to both Bruce Wayne, and in a certain way, directly to the audience. He tell us that " Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded. Because sometimes the truth just isn't good enough." Well, it's possible that the millions of TDK fans around the world want their faith rewarded. They are willing to sidestep the obvious flaws in the film, even if it means believing the self-delusion that the sum somehow makes up for the weakness of it's parts. I don't know... It's just a thought. But anytime a film urges people to believe the fallacy that lies are sometimes healthier than the truth, I have a hard time ignoring it. This is especially true when this notion is presented at a crucial point in the movie, when the thematic elements (as feeble as they are) are beginning to coalesce.

Jim...

I should have posted this in that other blog you had during which you claimed you were trying to understand the TDK fans better. I temporarily lacked the energy. I'd lost hope 1) trying to explain it to somebody who just won't get it and 2) all the fanboys were posting these long, comic-related speeches about what does and doesn't work in the film, as if the comics have much to do with it once it is a film. I figured my two cents would be pointless because you'd write off the "TDK" fans as products of capitalism and that's that.

I've been trying to formulate a way of describing the things you do that drive me up the wall. The bottom line, in my mind, is you keep a distance between yourself and any movie, a distance made up of your intellectualism and analytical instincts. And I think any responsible, smart filmgoer does do that. But it's a question of degree that bothers me. Where do we draw the line and just... let go?

I've come to have a more emotional approach to films. I find I get more out of life and do come to understand things just as well. I give myself up to a film as much as I can. Maybe you feel you do the same. It seems to me you're suspicious of everything. Always on guard. Must be tiring.

I came across a quote today that made me think of you.

"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

While I know you don't find everything ridiculous, I feel you do find almost everything ridiculous. Whereas a critic like Roger Ebert is the sensible man, who is willing to forgive some questionable moments in films (such as the sequence you describe here) is the payoff is worth it. And the funny thing is... the more you forgive, the more the payoff seems to become worth it. Because after a while the forgiving becomes easy. You take scenes like the bank robbery in stride.

I know the dust does not settle and the cops should obviously see the bus. I thought the same thing the first time I saw the film. And then I immediately thought next... but we get the idea of how he would get away with it. Nolan could take more time to let the dust settle, but he takes a chance on the audience being quick enough to get the point. Besides, the imagery is nice. The Joker is already gone before the dust even settled.

Who ever said the movie was realistic? Nolan talks about adding 'realism' to it but I think all he means is... taking the character more seriously than Tim Burton's cartoonish interpretation. Go less for gags and more for what these characters represent and mean to audiences.

You complain a lot about dialogue. But I rather liked the dialogue and the faces of the characters speaking it is interesting. If you asked Bergman, he would tell you faces are the subject of cinema. And there have been whole movies that are, more or less, just good dialogue being acted out intriguingly ("My Dinner With Andre").

And if you look at many classic film-noirs, they all have their moments of hokiness and implausibility, they are dialogue heavy and they rely on acting, particularly character acting because, visually, all you have is the arrangement of the characters and lighting (and black-and-white cinematography).

Nolan constructs "The Dark Knight" as a partial film-noir, in my opinion... and Roger Ebert also picks up on how Batman "has his origins in film-noir". There are moments of hokiness in "TDK", the action scenes (like in noirs) are not always so great but they're never "Quantum of Solace" guns-shooting-from-point-blank-range bad either. You have the various lighting, you have the character actors (gangsters, even Tiny Lister Jr. on the boat at the end) and the major character actors (Caine, Freeman, Oldman) and the leads which are shady characters, from Joker to Wayne to Dent. And the characters are archetypes, symbolic and the movie will be more moving if you look at them as embodiments of philosophies.

But, alas, it is already becoming too manipulative for you Jim. After all, the parables in "Crash" did not work for you, and though you were intrigued by the "Babel" storylines, you felt where it went couldn't overturn all the hyperlinking.

And now I turn to Ebert, yet again. In his defense of "Crash" and I think it can be stated in regards to "The Dark Knight".

"It is useful to be aware of the ways in which real people see real films. These real moviegoers are not constantly vigilant against the possibility of being manipulated by a film. They want to be manipulated; that's what they pay for, and that in a fundamental way is why movies exist."

One of the key players in "TDK" is Harvey Dent, the middle-man between The Joker and Batman. He falls, somewhat understandably and the movie pleads with us to understand we are all susceptible to such frailty. And I think this - and all the thoughts related to it - are what 1) unlock the movie and 2) speak to viewers who have said they like the film and are moved by it.

I must add now the second part of Ebert's speech:
"Usually the movies manipulate us in brainless ways, with bright lights and pretty pictures and loud sounds and special effects. But a great movie can work like philosophy, poetry, or a sermon.

But the thing is "TDK" does give us the poetry and sermons... mixed in with the bright lights, pretty pictures, loud sounds and special effects... which are handled with greater care than a Michael Bay film for example. I won't go into defending Nolan's technical direction right now - which would involve pointing out how even Kurosawa just showed zoomed in, incomprehensible images of feet and arms moving about - I go instead to Pauline Kael who gave out the most important secret of film criticism:

"Great films are rarely perfect films."

There you have it! So now can we stop wasting time worrying about settling dust and light changes and focus on what else is there?

And now I go to another one of the all-time great female critics, Manohla Dargis.

"[Ledger's] Joker is a creature of such ghastly life, and the performance is so visceral, creepy and insistently present that the characterization pulls you in almost at once. "

Bingo! And to Stephanie's comment that the performance builds to nothing... he's The Joker, he's not gonna change over the night and he's all about contradictions and that is what is fascinating bordering on maddening. For all his talk of schemers, he is the biggest. Is that to just confuse/terrify people more? I think so. Or maybe he's simply a hypocrite. Either way, that's interesting. Which to me is where the performance builds... to the fact that he, the embodiment of anarchy, contradicts himself OR he is as unsure of himself as anybody else. About the ladder... and this is what knocks Ledger's performance into greatness for me... there are two moments in the film when I feel like we get a glimpse into the man behind the make-up. (Actually, four if you count his two scar-speeches.) The first is when he's talking to the gangsters and says "A guy like me" to be interrupted with "A freak". Ledger's quick, subtle reaction is to look down, lost for a moment. "...A guy like me..." He then says "Look, listen." Now let's go to the script. In the script, he's supposed to continue as if he wasn't interrupted, perhaps turning "A guy like me" "A freak" into a joke.

I think Jonathan Nolan envisioned:
"A freak."
"A guy like me!" (As if The Joker feels he's been complimented.)

Instead, Ledger's Joker seems... not quite shook... but not just annoyed. And Ledger adds in the "Look, listen" which you might just say is meaningless add-lib but, from the first time I saw it, his entire reaction strikes me as a guy who is putting on an act and, for a second, is losing control of it, only to think to himself "get it together".

But then I also think the final shot of "Eastern Promises" is a bit fishy too, prompting us, with the way Viggo flips his watch as if waiting for everything to fall into place, to question if the character was playing both sides - the mobs AND the police - for his own personal gain/ he's basically an opportunist who saw a shortcut to being head of the mob (through working for the police) and took it, which fits with the film's themes of ambiguous identity and acting a certain way to stay alive.

But then... hey... maybe it's all nothing. But I notice these things. And if it fits, it fits, like your theories on the visuals in "No Country for Old Men" Jim, such as Death (Chigurh) selling off his principles to dissapear into sunny suburbia...

Which I buy cause it works in tandem with everything else set-up in the film.

And so does Ledger's Joker hesitation during his introduction to the mob. It adds another dimension to the character: that he is acting, it's all a show, he's desperate to intimidate, and maybe his anarchy is as fake in its strained contrivance as Bruce's naivety that Gotham is close to saving itself. And, at the end, when the fireworks (bombs on the boats) do not go off, look into Ledger's eyes. You see a little kid just short of crying because his life cannot be explained. As much as The Joker claims he is for nothing but wreaking terror, the only truth, the truth is that he wants to believe in something as much as anybody else. He wants to believe in not believing.

I'm fascinated by that grey area, and, to me, you can talk all you want about what the movie does and doesn't show in regards to illustrating its themes, but it's all right there in his performance.

And Eckhart's as Dent who slips from desperation into madness.

And Bale's quiet Batman who keeps his thoughts to himself as he contemplates what his role is. As Manohla Dargis writes "when he perches over Gotham on the edge of a skyscraper roof, he looks more like a gargoyle than a savior. There’s a touch of demon in his stealthy menace. During a crucial scene, one of the film’s saner characters asserts that this isn’t a time for heroes, the implication being that the moment belongs to villains and madmen. Which is why, when Batman takes flight in this film, his wings stretching across the sky like webbed hands, it’s as if he were trying to possess the world as much as save it."

So we have three morally-grey characters and other shady, film-noirish fiends such as the mobsters, The Scarecrow and even Coleman Reese who wants to blackmail Bruce Wayne. And then we have something else film-noirs have... an atmosphere. Again to Dargis who writes that Gotham is "soulless, anonymous, a city of distorting and shattering mirrors." And the cinematography brings out the sinister in those fun-house mirrors all the more. So there is an atmosphere.

And, at the heart of it all, the fascinating characters wage physical and intellectual war, with their souls as stake more than their lives.

That's what I got out of the film, scene by scene. Is the movie somewhat messy overall? Maybe... maybe not. I was fascinated. I was moved. I was supremely entertained. And, during the ferry scene, I was no longer a spectator. I was provoked. I became a participant. I asked myself, in a situation where I seem screwed every which way... what do I do?

What do people do in those situations? To me, that's at the heart of "The Dark Knight". If the notion of action movie meets preachings-of-philosophies seems to cheap-as-an-old-comic-book to you then, alright. But I don't think it's any more far-fetched than any readings of "No Country for Old Men", the only difference being "NCFOM" is a perfect movie, with perfect action sequences and "TDK" is not, but they both moved me.

*****

Meanwhile... a good 20 or so other worth-talking about movies have come out and have hardly been given mention on this blog, which is fair because it is your blog, but I'd like to see any film stand up to how hard you're being on this flick. Hell, even "Citizen Kane" is ham-fisted the way I see it. But I still love it overall. You think I can comprehend every sequence in "Seven Samurai"? Hell no! And, yet, I hear critics all the time talk about how it shows strategic planning and whatnot. For that matter, I can't even really make-out half the shootouts I've ever seen in any Western (especially not the much-celebrated OK Corral in "My Darling Clementine"). But I enjoy the energy of those films, the acting, the characters, the dialogue, the ideas, little moments that add up to become the whole.

For me it's more... how much can I really immerse myself in this film and be moved, fascinated, discover interesting things. That's my approach to filmgoing and I'm quite happy with it. It writes off "Quantum of Solace", makes "Wanted" into mediocrity, and condemns junk like "Death Race". But, Jim, you don't see those movies. Nor should you. But, if you did, you might walk into "TDK" saying, in a word, "Finally!"

So I think your high standards come into play here also. I mean... in your original post, you did say you walked having had a good time, if flawed. Now your quoting people who say the movie is bad in so many ways. And that it's not just you et cetera. Man, I thought "TDK" would at least get as friendly a response as you gave "Iron Man". Good enough for a thumbs up. But apparently you didn't have a good time. You lied about that, the film is terrible and deserves your continued, focused criticism (destruction) of it.

And I've heard your reasons why. Not that you need to give them. It's your blog, do what you want. And the film is popular and maybe your reacting to how some of your fellow critics have been treated, very savagely and unfairly and I'm sorry for that but, hey, that's not all of the "TDK" fans. I honestly think most of us were just moved/intrigued/provoked by it as much as anything else we saw this year, despite some (arguable) shortcomings in the action. So shift the criticism to some other scenes already, will ya?

I guess I'm just turning the camera right now (a la the witchdoctor and Jack Nicholson in "The Passenger") and trying to understand you a little better. Is that important to you to try to ruin this movie? Nevermind, clearly it is and fair enough. Film criticism is film criticism, it all serves its purpose. But, dude, nothing I've said has changed the way you think, nothing you've said has changed the way I think. This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. And I think it's because we have such completely different approaches to viewing the film. You keep dwelling on action sequences, dialogue instead of visuals. But Manohla Dargis, Ebert, many fans of TDK including myself, we're talking about stuff that spoke directly into our souls.

And when what we're feeling is so strong, when the film speaks to us so powerfully, that can override technicalities. Not that I even personally feel the technicalities are indeed flaws. I'm just trying to conceive of how they could bother you. And I see it... but I'm surprised you didn't shrug your shoulders at it by the time you get to the interrogation scene.

Or maybe not. After all, you love "Barry Lyndon". I come back to my Goethe quote. The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous.

JE: "Take a look, for example, at how we're introduced to Commissioner Loeb (the only character we've never met whose fingerprints wind up on the Joker's card, thus marking him as a murder target)"

We are introduced to Commissioner Loeb, in Batman Begins. I admit he doesn't get a whole lot of screen time, but he is in charge even when Bruce is a young boy and his parents get murdered. How he managed to remain commissioner for 15+ years is probably more of a mystery.

Putting aside the bus problem for a moment, it actually bugs me more that when the bus comes crashing through the bank in the first place, it doesn't get anywhere near close enough to the henchman to do any damage (Nor does the debree appear to hit him) but he suddenly flies backwards as if he's been hit by....well, a bus and presumably dies.

JE: I think it's weird that we see how Judge Surrillo's fingerprints get on the card, but not Dent or Loeb. That would have made for some mystery and suspense: What does this card signify? Then the payoff comes when Surrillo's car explodes and Joker cards fly everywhere. Must have been chopped out of this very choppy movie.

To Jim about the scene in the interrogation room where the Joker is left in the room with a cop by himself. That's standard procedure when there's someone in custody who might try to hurt themselves. And the thing with taking his handcuffs off I believe has to do with interrogation techniques. It's probably harder to get someone willingly to tell you where they put a bomb if you've tied them up in some way.

Well, if Gotham City is anything like Chicago, perhaps the crowds on the street simply assumed they were filming a comic book movie.

That's pretty much what I assumed when I passed rubble on my commute through Lower Wacker sometime back.

Note: While I enjoyed the film, and the scene, I do admit that that the more logical choice would've been to have the bus pull BEHIND the whole caravan -- instead of finding some magic gap that spontaneously opened up in the middle of Chicago rush hour traffic. Seriously, anybody in the Loop at that time of day would be lucky to make a rolling-right like that (Don't even bother with a left). I'm sure the reason Nolan went with it is the same reason any director runs with a staged event that has no basis in reality: "Because it looked cool."

Really, I think it's small potatoes. The "Looks Cool" way of staging scenes is one of the benchmarks of Hollywood. Not much to hinge your argument on. I'm a fan of the movie and I can think of far better examples of inconsistencies in tone, philosophy, action sequences, and plot points. If anything, I think the bus sets up the MO of the film, which seems to say: "We're going to give you a more realistic Heat based movie, but with the same crazy James Bond logic you expect out of most comic book movies."

Whether he successfully married those two or not is up for debate. Personally, I respect those that don't like the movie. I'm not one of those fanatics calling for the stoning of anyone who doesn't herald it as the greatest thing since indoor plumbing...

But I think the problem most of the naysayers have with the movie may not be the implausibility, but the realism with which he chose to frame that implausibility in. There's nothing in the Dark Knight that I find any more or less implausible than in a dozen other comic book movie hits. But by running his comic book movie through a more dramatic Heat/French Connection/Bullit filter, Nolan may have been setting up an impossible standard that his fusion film couldn't live up to.

As for incoherency, I don't really disagree. But why this comes as a shock to any critic is beyond me. I have never found any of Nolan's films (interesting as they maybe) particularly coherent. Present company excluded, I find this sudden turnaround by some critics a tad suspicious and maybe a little disingenuous. I still think the theory I mentioned may hold a piece of the answer. And let's not forget the backlash against Nolan for abandoning his indie roots to "sell out" to the Hollywood blockbuster machine. I actually read a foreign review where the author just blatantly came out and said that. And there are other reviews that seemed to have that undercurrent buried in the subtext.

I don't know. Regardless... I think the fact that we can all talk about this silly little comic book movie for so long proves it has some worth. And it's refreshing that a lot of it seems to be based on the craft of making a film... not some retread of what happened on page 26 in issue 117 of Batman and how the filmmakers got that wrong along with the color of Batman's utility belt or whatever.

Erik: Focusing on the implausible over the outrageous seems pedantic.

As Douglas Adams wrote, "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."

Impossible things work when they have their own internal logic. The scene Jim criticizes depends on people behaving in ways they simply do not behave (school bus drivers who politely make way for another bus that's just crashed through a wall) and realistic objects working in ways they simply do not work (a bus that crashes through a wall and sustains no obvious damage). It's not just impossible, it's improbable. Sometimes improbable things work in a straight suspense or action movie, but fantastic films ask us to accept so much that's impossible that any lost plausibility hurts.

The points raised against the logic of the film are valid, but they don't seem to bother me in the context of cinema history. Has anyone noticed the similarities between the Joker and Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler"?

Both films open with a heist both ingenious and implausible. The Bank heist in "Dark Knight" has already been discussed. In "Der Spieler," a man on board a train is robbed of his valise, which contains an important treaty. The thief tosses it out the window JUST as the train passes over a bride, JUST as a car passes underneath; the valise lands neatly in the backseat. The car's driver sounds a horn, which alerts a man stationed at the top of a telephone pole, who taps the wire and calls Mabuse himself. Mabuse has it all so perfectly timed, he even knows when to reach for the phone to hear that everything has gone to hand.

Both Mabuse and Joker have vague identities. The Joker, it is noted, has no record, no background, his clothes are custom, and all he carries are "Knives and lint." Likewise, Dr. Mabuse's identity is suspect, due to his array of disguises which allow him to go from an elderly banker one minute to a young playboy the next.

Both have seemingly sweeping networks of loyal followers. The Joker has them all over, stationed in buildings ready to fire wires to trap helicopters, or carry bombs in their stomachs. Mabuse likewise has all manner of people ready to turn up at a moments notice. Like when he needs to pass along a message. He writes it on a piece of currency, and as he walks out of his headquarters disguised as a financier, he hands it to a beggar on the street; the beggar works for him.

Both use the dregs of society for their plans. The Joker favors schizophrenics and other mental patients. Mabuse uses drug addicts.

Most of all, both function as agents of disorder and chaos. Joker of course talks at length about these motives, about what he can do with a "couple of bullets and a few drums of gasoline." Mabuse similarly creates chaos by manipulating the stock market and national finance, as well as counterfeiting to promote inflation.

And in both cases, I think the chaos element is vital to making these films believable, or rather, enabling the audience to suspend their disbelief. If the Joker or Mabuse had a specific, materialist goal, I think an audience would be far less forgiving, because they become much more realist and worldly, and we all know that the human mind as it's limits in terms of planning and coordination. But because they lack goals, advocate such terrifying ideas, they are fundamentally non-human, and much more abstract, the embodiment of what they preach: disorder.

Furthermore, such implausibility serves to heighten the tension of the audience, and create almost a sense of paranoia. Watching either film, we are confronted that, were we to inhabit those world, this chaos COULD happen to us. Both figures are so nearly godlike in their ability to plan and anticipate (despite their advocacy for a world where such things are not possible) that we lose the safety of the "it always happens to someone else, never to me," conceit. Everyone is a target, because their reach is so great. Plausibility takes a backseat. And in a post 9/11 world (an event I'm sure many of us would have thought implausibly until it actually happened), these films have an even more immediate implication for us, the viewer.

Best,
Brian Rose

Jim,

If you want another scene/sequence to question/analyze, try the Joker's escape from prison (the "I want my phone call trick").

He walks into the main office of the police station and detonates the bomb that is located in a schizophrenic's stomach, presumably killing the police who are right around the schizophrenic. But why does it just seem to knock out everyone in the office WHERE the Joker is standing? And the Joker is just left unscathed?

JE: Actually, I mentioned that in a reply to an earlier comment but I have to admit at that point the movie had long since ceased making any story/character/thematic sense at all. I couldn't tell what was blowing up where. How does Harvey Dent's face get burned (after he has so carefully drenched one side in flammable liquid)? It's really badly staged, with that long slo-mo shot of him writhing. I kept thinking: Wow, if you have liquid petroleum products on your skin, that usually burns off first before your flesh has time to catch fire. As it's depicted, neither Batman nor Harvey does a think to put out the flames -- they must've burned for a LONG time! Oh, and if Batman and Gordon both arrived at their destinations at the same time, then what difference does it make which location/hostage Batman "chose"? And when the cops know that Batman and Gordon have rushed out to prevent TWO Joker-planted bombs from being detonated across the city from each other, of course a cop is going to simply hand the Joker a cell phone... which just happens to detonate a THIRD bomb, but could easily have set off either or both of the other two.... Oh, I give up.

This is beyond anal.

You're better than this, Jim.

So last year your obsession was proving that No Country for Old Men was a masterpiece, and this year it's proving that The Dark Knight is not. It must be exhausting being you.

I wish you would say what your problem with this scene is. I'm guessing it's that it looks like everything was so precisely planned, down to the second. But just because that's the way it happened, doesn't mean it was that finely planned.

The police are responding to a silent alarm. They don't know what the circumstances are, they just know a bank is being robbed. So even if the other school buses weren't there, or even if he pulled out last, and they saw a school bus with debris falling off, they probably wouldn't immediately piece it together. Are we really supposed to expect that the cops instantly see a dusty bus and piece the Joker's entire crazy plan together in a blink? They don't even know that the bank wall is smashed open at this point. And a school bus it probably a good getaway car at 8 in the morning or 3 in the afternoon, even if it is alone.

Similarly, maybe the bus behind him does know something crazy is going on. Maybe he almost did rear-end him. What's he supposed to do? He can't just pull over and wave down the cops. He can't ram the bus off the road. His job is to keep 50 screaming kids safe. Even if he calls things in on the radio, he sort of just has to act like it's business as usual and get the kids to school, or home, and not panic them.

So just because it went down like that, doesn't mean that one or two seconds one way or the other ruins his master plan.

Now if you want to yell about the whole cellphone-bomb-in-the-stomach, I'd be more inclined to agree with you. But by then you need to roll with the punches.

If I was going to try to rationalize the precision of his plan later on, I guess I'd say he planned for multiple contingencies. That if the Joker never got arrested, there'd still be a cellphone-bomb-guy in jail, but it never would have been in the movie. And there were other irrelevant contingency plans that we never saw because they were irrelevant the way things played out. I mean if that was his only plan, and it was perfect, he could've used a timer instead of a cellphone.

Although I concede that's as equally outrageous as the precision theory.

I tend to believe that, in film, what you see is what you get, and that one's first emotional or intellectual response to a scene or individual shot in a film is the correct one. I believe that movies are designed to work, first and foremost, on an emotional level, and that my emotional reation to what I'm seeing informs my brain about what's going on. When I first saw the school bus pull out of the bank building in TDK, and merge into the stream of school buses, outside, my gut reaction was that the Joker had commandeered a small fleet of school buses, and they were being driven by his henchmen to mask his escape. Had he not already hired all the goons who'd just finished robbing the bank? Had he not given each of them specific (if not somewhat implausible) instructions to kill one another after each level of the heist had been completed? Within the context of this film, and this character, it's not illogical to assume that everything we see, right down to the line of buses and the gap in those buses, was planned by the Joker, and that all went according to plan. That was what my gut told me, anyway, and the first time I saw it, I thought it was pretty neat. (It is also the simplest explanation, which is usually best.)

What bothers me the most about this shot is the obviously grafted-on-during-postproduction sound of children laughing on those buses. This was obviously done in post, those buses are obviously empty, and why would Joker's goons be tooling around with a bunch of actual school kids in their getaway vehicles?

As to the other flaws (no gawking crowd, streetlights, etc.), well, every film has flaws. Look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. Look at Jurassic Park. They're full of gaping holes in action an continuity. (Ever notice that the little rack on top of the cab of the truck in the great chase in Raiders keeps getting knocked off, then keeps reappearing? Watch the first appearance of the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and compare the geography of that scene to an earlier shot in which a goat is staked out as a meal for the T-Rex.) Great directors cheat all the time in order to provoke an emotional reaction from the audience. Nolan does this several times throughout TDK.

What bugs me most about this movie is the scene where Joker crashes Bruce Wayne's party. It goes completely unresolved. How did Dent escape the closet? Did Rachel ever tell him that Bruce Wayne himself put him in a chokehold? Why is it that Alfred seems to suspect something amiss as he approaches the elevator doors? And, of course, why, oh why, does Nolan cut to a completely different scene immediately after Batman rescues Rachel? How did the Joker get away?

Hmmm. Doesn't all this just amount to a bunch of continuity errors and inconsistencies from shot to shot? And aren't a great deal of movies -- good, bad, and even great -- riddled with them?

Just as an example, how about DeNiro's hair length and style in Taxi Driver? It changes from scene to scene and is all over the place. If you love that movie, you're willing to overlook it, but if you don't, it's a pretty superficial excuse to bash on it. (And Scorsese's films have a great deal of continuity errors -- for another example, check out the scene where Jimmy Conway roughs up Mori (the obnoxious guy with the hairpiece) in the scene before Henry gets a frantic phone call from Karen in Goodfellas).

I guess I'm just saying, if you say a movie's great and point out all the continuity and consistency from shot to shot as a reason for its greatness, that would sound rather silly, wouldn't it? So isn't there better stuff to criticize in a movie you feel is a failure?

Obviously, The Joker put stereos playing a recording of children laughing inside the school bus. To fool any...helicopters. Or film watchers.

How this would help people watching the busses from the street is unclear.

I don't actually mind the cell phone-bomb trick, because I thought it was a fairly common trope in thrillers and didn't need explanation--but maybe I'm wrong? (Too much Veronica Mars, probably.)

I see what you're getting at. The Dark Knight is supposed to be realistic, but rather than paced in our world it plays in in fast forward. I don't mind this completely, but I see the contradiction, and I definitely think that some huge lumps of believability were sacrificed. What the movie needs more than anything else is breathing room.

Surely that shot is meant to inspire a knowing "Ha!" at the audacity of it, no? Isn't that where the fun is?

I don't know. I saw the movie twice, one regular, once IMAX and I never had trouble with the bus shot. I inferred that the joker hired all the buses and he had timed the gap for him to escape. I don't bother with the script because you always change the script anyway. I'm more concerned as to how the bat cycle could emerge from the Bat Mobile since there is no central axle for the front wheels, and then the bike rolls out sideways at the end of the chase.

"JE: Yes. It's what film critics do."

No it isn't. It's what nerds and fanboys do.

How did the Joker make his getaway so perfect from the bank? How did he engineer the prison escape so well? Who cares?

There could have been 100 different ways he engineered the school bus bank escape. Whether it's from his long surveillance of school bus patterns, his having men on the inside, or just pure luck, it doesn't matter.

Did you know that in Citizen Kane, it makes no sense that someone heard his last words if he died alone? That should put the nail in that overrated movie's coffin!

In other words, get a life.

Sure.

But you're talking about a "comic-book" movie where a billionaire dresses as a bat to fight crime becasue his parents were murdered.

See what I'm saying?

It's a "comic-book." Even if Chicago looks real (rather than Tim Burton's "fantasy Gotham" in his films) it is still a movie based on a comic book written with the (non-)sensibility of pulp situations amped up by outlandishness (and with the Joker...the comics-writers usually tossed story logic). You might as well ask Batman artist Dick Sprang (yes, that's his real name) why Batman was always fighting on top of giant typewriters...or why there ARE giant typewriters.

You could do the same thing with the "Iron Man" movie, the "Superman" movies (even the "good" one)or anything with a "pop" sensibility.

My first word of advice: Let it go. This will make you crazy and bitter. You'll sound like one of these kids who picked apart "Indiana Jones and Kingdom whatever" for story logic, ignoring the lapses of the previous ones they so cherished.

My second WOA: Do NOT see "Quantum of Solace"--the action sequences are so devoid of story-telling coherence as to be nearly indecipherable--certainly without a sense of being able to adequately travel from one shot to the next.

I'm going to guess at a couple of Mr. Emerson's next examinations:

* The Joker and accomplice are able to blend in with other cops in a large memorial service in broad daylight, unnoticed until the moment they fire their weapons (and are revealed to the audience).

* The city decides to evacuate a large number of people via ferry, and no one notices or checks to see that the entire lower deck of the ship is a big bomb.

On first viewing, the movie moves forward in a way that I didn't really question a lot of it. On second viewing, I had many, many questions. Yet, I still find it to be a compelling film. Ledger's Joker is one of the creepiest characters I've seen in a movie. The themes may be a bit too broad and hokey - "I was meant to inspire good!" - but at least there are themes and an attempt to provide some depth to a story about people who dress up and jump off of buildings and such.

There is a heck of a lot wrong with this shot, and most of its has already been said – e.g. the lack of damage to the back of the bus, the fact that the cops seems to be making a left turn into the bank, and the rather odd gap in the line of busses into which the Joker conveniently slips.

You know, it’s funny. My immediate reaction to the film was an overwhelmingly positive one – a response that was no doubt due in part to a lingering affection for the character and the bad taste left in my mouth from the copious amount of comic book dreck released into theaters over the past decade.

But the more I think about TDK, the more I begin to see its flaws. Of course there will be people who believe that in saying such thing I am merely jumping onto the bandwagon of backlash – but I don’t think so. Nolan is a very talented director, one capable of making really good movies, and he has managed to slip some superb stuff into this movie.

But this film has problems. Major, messy problems – the kind of problems that didn’t seem to plague Nolan’s earlier efforts. There are continuity gaffs galore here (and that bus sequence is just the tip of the iceberg), bizarrely written scenes that defy credulity (I initially thought Harvey Dent’s “Buy American” intro had to be some kind of dream sequence), and the pace of the overall narrative is much too fast. As one earlier poster also noted, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s death feels waaay too rushed. That the death of Bruce Wayne’s love interest and lifelong friend could have so little impact on him and receive such limited screen time is deeply strange.

And yet... Deeply flawed as I now believe the film is, I still think it has some really good aspects. The performances are excellent - and by this I don't simply mean Ledger. There are individual scenes and specific shots (like the moment when The Joker leans out of the taxi) that linger in my memory. But the film is flawed. No doubt about that.

What really burns some people, I suspect, and what magnifies this film’s flaws, is its massive media exposure. That exposure has been insane. No other film this year – good or bad – received as much attention (or made as much money) as TDK. This film’s exposure has turned what would otherwise have been a flawed but modestly interesting movie into something that people have a hard time avoiding. Not sure that’s a good thing.

Mountain meet molehill.

I'm not exactly sure what can be accomplished by analysis of this magnitude. For all of the "realism" Nolan is trying to inject into the film, at the end of the day this is still genre cinema. In the case of this shot we're dealing with a heist film within a film based on comic books, none of these genres are exactly known for strict plausibility.

No, I don't for a minute think a bus coming out of a building like that is going to get away undetected, then again the Joker's elaborate scheme to kill off his co-conspirators isn't much more believable.

No I don't think anyone could plan something as elaborate as The Joker's schemes, but then again I wouldn't call the Joker an entirely human character. His uncanny ability to plan out the schemes are sort of his superpower. That's why he's such a perfect nemesis for batman, because he's like a superhero but his powers derive not from science fiction but from intense training and uncanny intelligence. Did I mention that this was based on a comic book?

Call me Mike #2. If the other Mike can notice more flaws in TDK than I, I will beg him to come over for lots of cheap beer and be my heterosexual life partner forever.

Did someone say "thematic bounds?"

The worst things about TDK are not the countless offenses to reality. As much as it insists otherwise about itself, it is still a comic book movie, after all, and comic books tend to make up their own reality as they go along. The worst thing about TDK is its thematic inconsistency.

The film is about "chaos?" Um, no, it isn't. It's about control. Um, is it? Um, maybe it isn't. Wait a minute, is Batman a good guy or a fascist? He's a hero - not the hero the city deserves but the one it needs. Isn't that the other way around? I dunno, you either die a hero or live long enough to become a bureaucrat, or something, maybe a heroic bureaucrat. Um, what if you just live a long, regular life without becoming a hero or a bureaucrat? Can you do that? I think so - most of us do. Why would Gotham City go all mind-frakked sad and riotous if they found out Harvey Dent had become a murderer? (Show me, don't tell me - you're a g-d'ed movie!) Didn't they, just five minutes ago - prove their level-headedness by not blowing each other's boat up? Wasn't it Batman insisting to The Joker that Gotham citizens were strong enough to resist his nonsense? Next minute, he's taking the blame for crimes he didn't commit for the city's sake. Good luck with that. You just saved fifty people, single-handedly captured Kurt Cobain, prevented SWAT from making huge asses of themselves, and did it all in front of the one television journalist that the whole city seems to have on their widescreens all day long. Nobody's gonna raise their hand and say, "Um, wait a minute. We don't like him now? Again?"

Is this the same Batman who, in the last movie, decided he wouldn't kill the bad guy or save the bad guy, either? Now, he'll save ya, but he'll let everyone think he killed ya? This guy can't make up his mind one-way or the other about anything, can he?

The Joker seems to have a lot of things planned to the second. That doesn't exactly scream "crazy" nor "chaotic." Even his make-up streaks are precise. Unless crazy people perspire differently than the sane.

I think one has to put their brain on temporary pause while watching Christopher Nolan's bat-movies if one is to enjoy them.

I would like to point much of the film's flaws to Nolan's script. It seems that the schemes worked well on paper, but were not thought through all the way. Much like the bus escape sounds daring and clever on paper, it seems pretty thin on celluloid.

Nolan has filmed problematic concepts like this before. The largest of them all is in "Batman Begins" with the microwave emitter not vaporizing everyone in town, being that humans are mostly made of water.

Another point of analysis; Dent's confrontation at the end of the film with Batman and Gordon. During his coin flipping, he turns his gun to himself second instead of last. If his coin toss failed him, he'd be dead and his "big, dramatic moment" would be cut short. Yet another blunder by Nolan's script. I could see how it would seem dramatic on paper.... but on film this ruins the tension. Dent still has Gordon to torment... so how could he ever fail the coin toss, blast himself, and the credits roll?

My rule is pretty simple, Jim: if I didn't notice the implausibilities as the film was unfolding, then the film was doing it's job and the implausibilities, contrivances, and narrative holes no longer matter. I might notice them later, I might not, but who really cares if I enjoyed the film?

I think this blog would be better served dissecting the complicated relationships within the film and whether those work or correlating Batman's actions to his politics and expounding on how the audience's response to them reflects on all of us. TDK is apparently trying to say a lot, but I'm not convinced it's a very coherent or efficient statement. There's a lot to dissect and criticize their and it's a much more interesting conversation than this post.

But if you're just going to tear the most popular movies of the year apart for their implausibilities, I can't wait for your post dissecting the narrative absurdities of In Bruges, your #1 pick of the year. It's a good movie and all, but the final 20 minutes is fairly contrived.

I'm not trying to say TDK is the Best Film of the year (far from it) or mock your choice of In Bruges, a movie I liked and feel has been unfairly overlooked this year. I'm just trying to point out that this is ultimately a fairly pointless way to attack TDK's popularity.

You're smarter than this Jim.

I guess what this all comes down to is, was the movie well-made enough overall to make one overlook or forget about its flaws? I know Roger gave thumbs-down to the original Die Hard because he thought the Deputy Chief character's actions were so implausible -- even within the logic of an over-the-top action picture -- that his presence in the film brought the whole affair crashing down. I agree the character is stupid and useless and should have been edited right out of the picture, but the movie is so incredibly well-done otherwise from both a technical and stylistic point of view that it overcame what could have been a fatal flaw.

These are both perfectly legitimate subjective responses to that film, and my response to The Dark Knight was essentially the same. I knew even as the film was unfolding that many of the events onscreen were basically baloney, but the movie got me so involved at the level of story and character that I was able to look past the implausibility of it all. That the Joker's various stunts in the film would have been all but impossible for him and a handful of loony henchmen to coordinate is something I was prepared to accept within the fantastical framework of the film. (It should be said that I never found any of the action in the film to be downright incoherent.)

That all being said, Nolan and his fraternal co-screenwriter could probably have tidied up a lot of these sloppy bits and created a better film for it. And I can appreciate perfectly well that for many viewers, Nolan asked them to swallow incredulity (perhaps more than) one too many times. The Dark Knight has many, many virtues that I think earn it distinction, but the more rabid fanboys do seem to WANT the film to be a masterpiece so badly that they're prepared to construct all sorts of torturous rationalizations as to why Plot Point X made perfect sense and if it didn't make sense to you it's because you're an idiot or biased against the film or a snooty Georgetown cocktail party movie critic.

Even if I disagree with Jim over his overall appraisal of the film's quality or lack thereof, his criticisms have merit and provide the opportunity to actually learn something about film theory and technique. That's a potentially much more interesting discussion that people on either side of the debate pedantically trying to prove "I'm Right Right Right About TDK and You're Wrong Wrong Wrong."

"JE: I might buy this -- obviously, the punch line is the shot before this one and we're not meant to think about it too much, especially the first time we see the movie -- if it weren't for the addition of schoolchildren's voices to the soundtrack. Isn't that meant to imply that these are actual schoolbusses?"

I don't see how this is a problem. It is much too dark to know for sure if the bus has children or not, so because there are voices we assume there are kids.

Now the buses have kids on them, and I wonder, so what? You think the Joker would steal a bunch of empty buses from storage, which could be reported immediately? Or just take the buses that are supposed to be on the streets, and no one would realize they are missing until either the kids don't turn up at their stops, or the actual bus drivers (who were kidnapped or killed) are reported missing. The kids would probably be reported late first, and that might not happen to half an hour after their expected arrival home, giving Joker plenty of time to ditch the bus and make an escape.

There's not much more i can say about the bus shot that hasn't already been said. But referring back to Nolan's sense of spacing that Jim mentioned, one of the biggest flaws in the film for me was the lack of peripheral vision by some characters.

For example, in the scene where the Joker and his gang crash the party Wayne is hosting for Harvey Dent, Rachel punches the Joker and he says "you've got fight in you, i like that". Then Batman appears right next to him and says "then you're gonna love me!" Clearly the Joker would have seen him approaching, his henchman would have attacked Batman before that, people would have seen him come into the room, etc.

I know it's a small thing to complain about, and it's more about the effect of him just popping up and saying that than the actual logistics of the situation, but for this big of a movie, wasn't there anybody there to say "well this doesn't make sense, we should figure out a more creative way of Batman making his entrance as opposed to just using trick editing".

It happens at the end of the movie too. Dent has Gordon's kid at gunpoint and presumably is about to shoot him as Batman watches. I was waiting for Batman to have some ace up his sleeve move, like throwing one of his Bat weapons at him or something, that would knock Dent off of the ledge (like at the end of Die Hard with the gun taped to Willis' back). Instead, Batman just waits till the last minute and..... tackles him. In fairness Dent does toss a coin into the air so he is distracted, but still it's such a lame way for Batman to save the kid. And it's not like Dent wouldn't be able to see him coming and have the time to shoot him, or at least react before he gets tackled.

JE: Could it be that the addition of the children's voices on the soundtrack were to save money on extras that day -- to leave us with the impression that they are full of kids even though they are not?

Me: It made enough of an impression on me.

JE: I don't think the movie is full of sleight-of-hand, but not well-executed enough to do what it's supposed to do, which is to direct your attention away from what's really going on.

Me: Not sure about that Jim. I mean... you're under this huge impression that the movie is striving for absolute realism.

JE: Take a look, for example, at how we're introduced to Commissioner Loeb (the only character we've never met whose fingerprints wind up on the Joker's card, thus marking him as a murder target);

Me: What about it?

JE: Or the set up to the big truck chase sequence on "Lower Fifth" that begins with a cop shooting from a truck, a burning fire truck, and a garbage truck -- none of which have been linked previously.

Me: Uh... so? You can easily get the ideal the garbage truck belongs to a Joker goon, the burning truck was attacked by joker goons earlier - and Nolan did not want to show that because it would be creepier if we encountered it from the SWAT trucks P.O.V. And the cop shooting from the truck? Where is this? Do you mean the cop getting shot from the truck by The Joker?

JE: "Or the astonishing chain of events in which the Joker is arrested, put in a holding cell for observation, de-cuffed by Commissioner Gordon"

I think it's just a humane gesture from sometimes-too-good-hearted Gordon.

"Beat up by Batman"

Yes and...

"And then inexplicably left alone (still uncuffed) with another cop"

He's not left alone with another cop. There's cops outside the door... with guns. And that's just at that level, there's probably more below which are ambushed by joker goons arriving when the bomb goes off. And the cop at the door has the keys to the door so he can escape but the assumption is, he's one of the toughest guys on the whole force so he can handle himself in there. The Joker, after all, isn't so strong so much as vicious, rabidly energetic and cunning.

"The Joker baits with lies"

Lies? He baits him with insulting remarks about his friends, which the cop unwisely lets get to him. I know it's a very stupid movie by the cop - which he admits to when the other cops have got him and The Joker at gunpoint and he says "just shoot 'em" - but people do stupid things, Jim. Happens everyday. Maybe you don't ever. But people do.

"Predictably overpowers [the cop]"

The cop is bigger and stronger than The Joker. Not saying that means I think the cop could beat him in a fight, I'm just saying that's probably what that cop thinks. The only way The Joker overpowers him is because The Joker picked up a shred of glass from the broken interrogation window. (I think that's what happened... otherwise, he just had a small blade up his ass, which I wouldn't put past him.) The Joker was not supposed to have anything sharp... but Batman went and broke the window by slamming the Joker into it.

"Leading another cop to toss him a cell phone."

Cops don't shoot because they are worried their shot will hit their friend, who The Joker is using as a human shield. But they should shoot anyway but they think... well, if he all he wants is a phone call?
(Which he has a right to...)

"So he can set off a bomb he's planted inside an arrested henchman"

Mhm. It's all part of the plan. He figured he either would get caught or, if that failed, would allow himself to be caught, perhaps even turn himself in. The whole thing was just to give an illusion that Dent was safe.

And the bomb inside the henchmen... it's like the next logical (insane) step in the evolution (degenerate ways) of suicide bombers.

"that could just as well have been one or both of the time bombs set up for Rachel and Harvey Dent (because we've never heard of bombs being set off by cell phones before, have we?)..."

Do I believe it's not possible? No.

"Every moment is more idiotic than the last"

Or you just scrutinize each moment more than the last and are too cynical to believe anything remotely unrealistic.

Reminds me of a "Life Beyond Earth" science class I took. Every chapter, the textbook would have a section focusing on how a popular sci-fi movie is unrealistic. Using logic and facts of reality, it lambasted "2001", "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Star Wars". And it called the final act of "2001" nothing but a lightshow. For some intellectuals, there's just no getting it.

"(Oh, and if you're wondering why Harvey knocks over a container of inflammable fluid and rubs One Side of his face in it, well, it's so that will pay off in the most unlikely (and awkwardly filmed) way just after he is rescued and is suddenly transformed into..."

It could happen. Besides, it's symbolic. Half of him died with Rachel.

I don't know, I bought it. And, obviously, a lot of audiences did. You know why? Because it's not impossible.

Just like "Slumdog Millionaire", another movie you weren't fond of, isn't impossible either.

And this is the second post I've sent to you today. In my other post, I argued about how you're hung up on technicalities... that aren't that unbelievable, not so much that they took me right out of it. (My reasoning is above.) But, then again, I just went in expecting about as much realism as a film-noir... or, more accurately in regards to the things you complain about... a film-noir fight.

Joel wrote this:

"My rule is pretty simple, Jim: if I didn't notice the implausibilities as the film was unfolding, then the film was doing it's job and the implausibilities, contrivances, and narrative holes no longer matter. I might notice them later, I might not, but who really cares if I enjoyed the film?

I think this blog would be better served dissecting the complicated relationships within the film and whether those work or correlating Batman's actions to his politics and expounding on how the audience's response to them reflects on all of us. TDK is apparently trying to say a lot, but I'm not convinced it's a very coherent or efficient statement. There's a lot to dissect and criticize their and it's a much more interesting conversation than this post."

And I agree with his first paragraph and his arguing for focusing on analyzing the relationships of the film, how they correlate to the themes, and how coherent the movie is. Because I think that's what people who like the film are reacting most strongly to.

Some of the more volatile reactions here ("Get a life") are awfully childish. "The Dark Knight" is one of the most popular films of all time, for better or worse, and it demands not only attention, but scrutiny. Its subtext, narrative, and style should all be examined. Jim's initial post might seem nitpicky, but he admitted that it's a "small example."

Besides, there are moments that strain credulity; for me, the worst was how the Joker knew exactly where to place his anti-helicopter brigade. And I agree that we needed to feel more of an impact when Rachel died. There's maybe one or two scenes of emotional grief, and then we move on. Her specter should dominate the rest of the movie.

However, I side more with Karlos's novel-length post about how effective it is on an emotional/intellectual level, and I will add that, as a lifelong Bat-fan, there's something cathartic and exciting about seeing adaptations that afford a real respect and intelligence for the comic's finest moments. Not just the smaller nods (like the Bat-signal summit), but for understanding who these characters truly are, and why they continue to fascinate so many years after their creation.

Here, we have a truly malevolent, Mephistophelean Joker, a tragic and sympathetic Two-Face, and a Batman torn between heroism and fascism. Flawed men trying to understand who they are, why they do what they do, and what they're truly capable of.

Funny that Jim, who puts The Edge of Heaven in his ten best list, a movie full of improbabilities and coincidences that boggle the mind, is so edgy about the ones found in TDK. Here's a movie where a student sleeping in a classroom is actually the daughter of a woman who is having sex with the teacher's father, and the lover of a woman who will end up living upstairs from the teacher's building in a different country. All of this without any character knowing anything about the others because of conveniently used props.

If we'd spend half the time Jim is spending on bashing TDK on any movie in existence, we'd probably end up without a list of merely good ones. If you're not ready to ignore the small glitches in TDK, at least put your judgment to the same use on other movies...

"I think the fact that we can all talk about this silly little comic book movie for so long proves it has some worth."

Or, it just proves an insane amount of media exposure invites an equal amount of dissection. And, for the record, most of the talk has been insisting that this is not some "silly little comic book movie." Most of the talk insists it is something of a masterwork.

I'll tone down my rhetoric when the other side tones theirs down. Until then, buddy, it's an all-night tournament of "mine is bigger than yours."

For those criticizing Jim's choice of topic: It ain't he who needs to "get a life." It's his blog, so he gets to choose the topic. You get to choose whether you read it or not.

These aren't "anal" continuity quibbles. These are directing and screen-writing mistakes. Sure, you suspend your disbelief enough to let one or two slide, but TDK beats you with one after the other like a roid-raging cage fighter. I'm not discovering these things upon second viewing of a dvd. They kept poking me in the eye right there in the theatre, making me spit out my popcorn.

And all of you hankering for a Best Picture or Best Director Oscar nomination have got to finally deal with it. You keep insisting that these flaws aren't flaws. You want me to believe Nolan's sloppiness is his major attribute.

Look, I'm a Batman fan. I have been most of my life. I'm also a fan of good movies, and some bad ones, and a lot of just average ones. There were parts of TDK that I liked, even though I almost missed them on account of the bleeding eyes and popcorn spittle. But, most of it was awful. Just not Jim-Carrey-wearing-a-blender awful.

Sorry, I refuse to accept "just not."

In regards to the plausibility/implausibility of the Joker's actions, Nolan gives us the impression that perfection in detail is impossible, and to keep those imperfections as masked as possible. As someone else pointed out, our first reactions are usually the right ones, and who on their first reaction to these scenes think as you do now, even you on your first viewing?

What makes us (fans) believe the improbable in this case is that between the writing of the Joker's character and the complete melding of Ledger's talents in disappearing behind that character, we are made to believe (within reason) that the Joker is capable of pulling off things which ordinary criminals cannot. It's the credibility of the characterization that makes it possible to overlook these things.

I'll also add to the other comments in that just about every film considered great, upon close scrutiny, will show implausibilities. The Dark Knight, like other great films in the action/adventure/epic crime drama, just hide the inevitable plot/logic holes really well behind great writing and performances.

JE: I'll agree that it's not the implausibilities; it's the way they are presented. As for whether the Joker, or Ledger's performance, is enough to get us to believe in this world, or to cover sloppiness, flaws, or deliberate holes in the filmmaking or the screenplay, that's obviously subjective. As I've said many times, I don't care much about plot. But what is the movie showing us, what is it illustrating or expressing? So, what is the movie doing by giving the Joker superhuman powers, as opposed to Batman's technologically augmented human ones? If Joker and Batman are two sides of the same coin... how so? Again, I'm not talking about fanboy backstory, I'm talking about film criticism: What the movie actually shows and tells us. And I'm not talking about "continuity errors" (whether the level of a beverage in a glass is inconsistent from shot to shot, or whether it gets cloudy and sunny within the same scene); I'm talking about the composition and timing of individual shots and how they are put together, the way you would look at word choices, order, punctuation within a paragraph or a series of them. All that matters is what is on the screen at any given moment. Everything else is conjecture. That's what I'm trying to get at with this initial exercise.

Oh, Karlos?

Here's the thing I believe about the difference between great movies, not-great movies, and bad ones.

A great movie shows you what is happening.

A not-great movie has characters tell you what happened.

A bad movie is one where you have to insert "well maybes" to explain what you've seen or heard happening.

When you pick at each of Jim's criticisms with one of your own "I assumed"s, you are proving his point, not deflecting it.

And why - oh why - are fans of TDK now backing away from praising it as the most realistic superhero movie ever? "We didn't mean capital-R realistic. We just meant lower-case-s serious!" Are they just now realizing that "realistic" and "superhero" ever belonged in the same sentence as much as "Palin" and "smart" do?

The whole Unrelated Opening Crisis gave me the same sinking feeling as I had during the beginning of The Matrix Reloaded: the spare, simple style of the earlier film has been replaced by standard bloated blockbuster storytelling. The only thing I thought of during that shot was the money that was being flaunted onscreen.

Okay, now I'm just plain confused. You insist (quite late) you're not talking about continuity and gaffes but instead "the composition and timing of individual shots and how they are put together, the way you would look at word choices, order, punctuation within a paragraph or a series of them." So why are you introducing a clip and essay with the "What's Wrong With This Picture?" Sounds like you're focusing on continuity errors and gaffes to me....

Then in your intro, right as you start to explain what you're getting at (in an update to clarify an already-cryptic opening...)you quickly link to someone else's broad generalizations, and don't even apply such statements to the clip? Maybe you wouldn't have to insist we've got it all wrong if you told us what we're supposed to be seeing, I don't know, in the article itself or the film clip?

Or maybe the headline should be "What's Wrong With the Introduction of This Essay?"

Believe me, I enjoy this blog quite a bit, and I'm not some ranting Dark Knight fan, but I'm just scratching my head at at this exercise so far. Is this meant to mirror the (in)coherence of the The Dark Knight?

JE: I'm sorry if it's confusing. I hope to clear it up more in further discussion. After all these months of arguments about "incoherence" or not, "comic book realism" or not, I wanted to choose this opening-sequence-capping shot and ask YOU to describe what you see in it, leaving it wide open for discussion but re-iterating my own feelings about the movie as a whole. Next time, I'll be more specific about my problems with the example first.

Reading this, the only question you've managed to raise is a resounding, "Yeah, so?".

And maybe, if you're lucky, a "Okay, what's your point?" to go with it.

Oh, Mike? #2?

All I'm trying to say is what Joel describes. I was never taken out of the film because I didn't analyze so closely. I got the general idea and kept moving with the film.

And if I was to look closer, as Jim has, I realize why nothing bothered me... because nothing seems terribly impossible, at least not to me.
But I don't demand absolute realism... from any film, ever. Give me enough plausibility to work with and I'm happy.

My overall feeling is that "TDK" is working far more on an emotional level than rational, though there is an intellectual aspect in the relationships, choices and philosophies of the characters... and that that's where I think the analysis should be taking place. Not in the action scenes, which are more visceral and symbolic. The idea communicated in the heist sequence is The Joker is so sneaky, and gutsy, that he gets away with stuff, right infront of you, in broad daylight.

We get the idea. Nolan could delay the police a little longer and make The Joker's escape better timed, therefore more realistic, easier for rationalists to accept but... then he's sacrificing imagery. It's a scale... perhaps balanced by Ledger's performance.

Says Justin:

"What makes us (fans) believe the improbable in this case is that between the writing of the Joker's character and the complete melding of Ledger's talents in disappearing behind that character, we are made to believe (within reason) that the Joker is capable of pulling off things which ordinary criminals cannot. It's the credibility of the characterization that makes it possible to overlook these things.

I'll also add to the other comments in that just about every film considered great, upon close scrutiny, will show implausibilities. The Dark Knight, like other great films in the action/adventure/epic crime drama, just hide the inevitable plot/logic holes really well behind great writing and performances."

Justin, thank you for providing me the missing link in my argument. It was on the tip of my thoughts when I was describing Ledger's magnificence... He really does tie it all together, for some of us.

*****

Now I'd just like to take a moment and say this has been a very enlightening Sunday for me... seeing how people see movies so differently. Like Jim has been talking about, "I would like it too if that was the movie I saw!" and suddenly I remember why I read Scanners and what drew me to Jim's writings in the first place. He's great (perhaps the best on the web?) at getting very interesting debates going. At first glance, I didn't think much of his post but seeing all the varied, complex responses here, I think he may just have hit a vein. Where do you draw the realism line? When do you draw it? Why?

It seems to vary from person to person (just as the definition of 'real' will vary from person to person in life). And, while I know I'll never be bothered by what bothers you or Jim in "TDK", I'm starting to see that some people simply will be... just like some people simply won't care that much next to the rest of the film. And then there'll be some people who feel it's hit and miss.

But if I'm watching "Touch of Evil" and I get to the horribly staged bar-fight or even the final scenes with the pointless radio transmitter scheme, I'm not suddenly going "Ah man! That just ruined the movie for me!" No, I'm mesmerized by Welles' acting and the character interactions.

Likewise, I'm not sitting there watching "My Dinner With Andre" and saying... it's all dialogue making up for stuff I'd rather see! You know why I'm not saying that? Because I'd rather not see it. I'm more interested by the dialogue and the faces of the characters as they speak it. Just my take on it. Maybe you'd rather see the stuff happen.

This blog actually got me and my roommate discussing this. He said "I don't care how good the dialogue or actors are, I cannot watch a movie that's just people talking in a room."

...My favorite scene in "The Dark Knight" is the interrogation scene.

Wow, a superhero movie that defies logic? Who would have guessed such a thing would even be contemplated, much less made into a movie that millions around the world loved?!

I think it's hilarious that the guy who wrote the screenplay for "It's Pat" somehow fooled people in to thinking that his opinion matters.

Just kidding, Jim. I love your blog, even though i don't share your distaste for TDK. In fact I love the film.

Mike #2 feel free to tear me up for that.

JE: Yep, I've been through the studio development process -- the pitches, the story meetings, the revisions -- on the sets/locations and in the editing rooms. I know how the sausage is made, 'cause I got my hands dirty and made some myself. Which gives me empathy not only for the sausage-makers, but for the sausage itself. Most valuable experience I've ever had as a movie critic and moviegoer, I'll tell you that!

One thing we know for sure now. Starting a thread about The Dark Knight is a guaranteed way to drive up traffic on any blog!

For me the question is not plausibility (in terms of storytelling) but rather something else that Jim has been mentioned before - Nolan's lack of ability to "coordinate physical space." Quite simply, the man can't stage an action sequence or even a complicated long take to save his life. I've felt the same about all of his movies except perhaps Memento.

Nolan's inability or lack of interest in shooting anything that actually explores that environment or situates his characters and their actions in space in a convincing manner undermines the effort to construct a "realistic" setting (i.e. Chicago). It also saps all the life out of his fight scenes. Compare the camera whips and hack-and-slash editing of this movie to the wrestling scenes in The Wrestler. Aronofsky does use the shaky cam but he pulls back from the action and uses longer shots that give those sequences a real visceral power. When the glass breaks over the head of one of the wrestlers, you can almost feel it. And it's no coincidence that the cinematographer on The Wrestler has worked primarily in documentary.

The Dark Knight action sequences deliver none of this ontological heft. You an argue, perhaps convincingly, that Nolan isn't trying to do that, but is trying to create something more impressionistic. Perhaps so, but it doesn't work for me.

JE: I don't know that traffic goes up all that much -- but it sure brings in the comments. That's the whole idea. And your comparison to "The Wrestler" is right on the money. A director has many, many tools and choices available. The movie is what he/she does with them, and looking at those choices is the reason this blog exists.

I get the same thing watching the clip over that I got the first time I watched it.

When I first saw the scene I hearkened back to when I lived in a crime-riddled neighborhood as a teenager, and what people would repeat if asked about witnessing a crime. "I didn't see nothing." That was exactly what I was thinking the bus drivers and all the people on the street were suppose to be thinking as the bus drove into the street. And of course, watching the rest of the movie after that, with the Joker's fascination in human's indifference to evil deeds so long as it's not affecting them, it makes perfect sense for the Joker character to utilize the "I didn't see nothing" attitude. The opening made me smirk. It's broad daylight. And so what the movie is saying off the bat is: what was once taking place at night, Batman's forced to take place in the day. Bus was suppose to have plowed through the corner of the bank and the cops are turning left around to the front of the bank, so no continuity error there as previous posts claim. And I didn't find anything in the movie to be too incoherent. Not sure where any of that comes from. And I'll take this post to point out something funny I noticed in the movie. Nolan has the criminals watching their wide-screen TV with the 4:3 ratio stretched out while watching the news. Then, within the next two scenes, Bruce Wayne is watching his wide-screen TV in the correct ratio. Thought that was a funny little director's joke. The thugs even commit crimes against film, I guess.

I'd be interested to see how Ebert feels about this debate, since he's a big TDK fan but also quite adept at picking a part films on a shot by shot basis.

I will admit straight off that I'm a comic book fan, so I'm perfectly willing to admit I probably cut the film more slack than I would have otherwise.

As for the bus scene, yes, that's bothered me a bit in replays. There's arguments you could make to explain it: another lackey in the bus he pulls in front of, things of that nature. In the end, I have to admit I don't much care. I acknowledge that there could be an explanation, and for me that's good enough. Everyone... well, I, in any case, enjoy seeing how the magic is pulled off. In this case, the heist. What's the plan, how are you going to get away with it? In that sense, I thought the opening was great.

As for the Joker himself, you seem to dislike how contradictory he seems, how he calls himself an agent of chaos even as he unleashes increasingly elaborate plans. It never even occurred to me that this could be a problem, til I read what you wrote. The answer seemed obvious, to me: he's a liar. We're shown, relatively early in the movie, two explanation for his scars, both of which are contradictory. It showed me, quite plainly, that this is a person for whom the truth was a plaything.

I don't really mean these as arguments, trying to change your mind on the film. I think films might be a little like jokes, where if you have to explain it, it loses its punch. Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.

Hi, Jim.

I have to admit to having cheated. I didn't watch the clip first.

So sue me. I remember that part of the movie quite well, though.

I remember seeing TDK in the theatre, and when Joker drove away in the bus, my first reaction was admiration for a well-planned and executed heist. My second reaction was "how did he find a school-bus sized hole in traffic? Why isn't there a huge crowd gathered around gaping at the front half of a school bus sticking out of a building?"

I hear you about your reservations about TDK; and I have a bunch myself. I have to agree that if a movie is making you think "how did that happen" in the middle of it, it's probably not working. So while it's possible to come up with a bunch of explanations for the discontinuities, apparent laziness, etc., to have to do so shows a basic weakness in the movie.

And yet...and yet...if we accept that interpretation, then there are still issues.

We have a director who has been (almost) universally lauded for his body of work essentially "mailing in" the biggest movie of his career.

We have to accept that he accepted a script that had these discontinuities and inconsistencies and whatnot.

Or...is it deliberate on his part? Is this surrealistic treatment of the material a...kind of statement about the insidiousness and pervasiveness of entropy, as personified in the Joker?

Maybe all these apparent problems with the movie are part of the point.

Short of a statement from Nolan, we'll probably never know.

Wow, you've certainly generated some flak with this post.

I want to offer you the the utmost thanks, however, for your jaw-dropping use of the word "inflammable" in your response to Mark. I've long been on an anti-"flammable" mission, but people always tell me I'm wasting my time and that I should find something better and more important to do.

Since you should be used to this type of criticism by now, would you care to be Robin to my Batman on my crusade to rid the world of this manifestation of evil and chaos?

JE: Done. As you can see, I'm learning more and more about the distinctions between "flame" and "inflame," too.

That shot seems like an extraordinarily silly thing to worry about.

JE: If it wasn't the capper to the opening sequence of the biggest movie phenomenon in recent history I probably would not have bothered.

"All that matters is what is on the screen at any given moment. Everything else is conjecture. That's what I'm trying to get at with this initial exercise."

Everything else is conjecture. Alright, I think we've gotten to the heart of the heart of this exercise. For some people, movies exist in their imagination as much as what's on screen, for some it's just what's on screen.

In Llewelyn's final scene (before Tom Bell finds him dead) in "No Country for Old Men", there is a sound of an airplane. If you recall, a little before this, Chigurh kills a man after asking him where the nearest airport is. So when I heard that airplane, I honestly expected it to have a nearby rough landing and then Chigurh would walk out. That's how much the character had been built up in my head by the writing and the performance by that point in the movie. And, you know what, if it had had happened, I would not disbelieve the sequence. (It just probably wouldn't have lead to as intriguing subsequent scenes.)

Not everybody would have been OK with it. How does Chigurh know how to pilot? You can't land a plane that easily there? Or if he hijacked the plane... he couldn't do that! Impossible! Well, actually, maybe people could have believed that.

Anyway, what did I know about Chigurh lead me to believe he was capable of showing up in a plane there, unlikely as it might seem. Other than his code, he's a mystery who shows considerable unstoppability.

The Joker is less of a mystery in that, I feel, there are hints as to what's REALLY driving him to do what he does (see above posts or Ebert's review for the clues/answers). BUT, we don't know The Joker well enough to put some of his schemes past him... and we certainly don't know he wouldn't be able to plant a cell-phone activated bomb in his goon. Who knows what this guy has been up to, likely all alone in some one-room apartment for the last few years. I need not tell you he wouldn't be the first guy to learn how to make bombs online... And that's assuming that's how he learned.

In any case, Ledger's Joker wouldn't be the first villain whose sheer freakiness makes me feel he has ways of beating improbabilities.

And they are just improbabilities. At least so far what you've shown me isn't flat out impossible, just unlikely. And the cumulative effect of that may have got to you. But I'll give you credit and see where you're going with this as this seems to only be exercise #1.

JE: But at least you HEARD an airplane, Karlos! If it was there, if it was in the movie, then it can be talked about. (The last sound, of course, is the ticking of a clock.) You can't just make stuff up and stick it into the movie, though. I'm beginning to think "The Dark Knight" is really about Intelligent Design. Anything one says about the film can simply be explained by attributing it to the all-powerful will of the God/Joker. We know the Joker planted the "cell" phone bomb in the burly hulk in the jail cell because he tells us that's what happened. (Oh, wait, but he works for the Joker: Should we believe him? Does it matter?) That is IN the movie. How the Joker learned how to make bombs is not in the movie. All we know about him is what he tells us. (And, again, we may believe or disbelieve him -- or, as many would have it, both at the same time.)

So, yes, I've just started with this, and although I know that, in broad strokes, I'm not saying much of anything that I and many others haven't said before, I am doing my best (starting with this post) to SHOW it: 1) the movie's hyper-realistic visual style works against its fantasy elements; 2) If the whole point of Batman is that he lives in a world where he not have "super powers," then why -- according to the movie itself -- are we supposed to think that the Joker, who inhabits the same world, does? Anything is possible, but what does the movie do (or not do) to show/convince us that it is? 3) The movie is not coherently constructed on the levels of character, story, or basic filmmaking grammar. Those are the three main points I want to address, starting above. To be continued...

Now we're getting somewhere.

Hi Jim,
I am starting to be concerned as to why you are so obsessed with proving TDK isn't the greatest film ever made. It was not my favourite film of 2008 by any means (There Will Be Blood has that honour, released in 2008 in my homeland thus qualifying, but I won't start you on the subject of that film). Where does this pathological desire to take down TDK come from? Let those who sat back and enjoyed it have their fun. IT'S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD IF PEOPLE ENJOY AND DEFEND A MOVIE. Good for them. Yes Jim, you know and we know you are intellectually superior to those who loved TDK. Who enjoyed a film and had a rollicking good time. Let it go. In the bus scene discussed here, I had a brief gnawing in my mind that it was very unlikely or impossible, but that was immediately overwhelmed by sheer appreciation of the concept and execution. That was me. Or if you can't get over the implausability (which I often can't), just sit there and dislike the movie. Such is cinema.

I'll use examples from "No Country for Old Men" as to why these kinds of complaints are absolutely ridiculous.

I read some people complaining about the people across the street from the bank not reacting to the bus in Dark Knight. I guess it didn't bother anyone that a man walks past the obviously burning car, which Chigurh has just lit on fire, without reacting. Furthermore, why did that car end up exploding? It's extremely unlikely that would have happened

Moss hides the satchel of money in an air conditioning vent. Why does the motel have air conditioning vents when it has air conditioning units in the window of each room (clearly visible when Chigurh is driving outside the motel)? That doesn't make a lot of sense. That could have been better executed in my opinion; shouldn't someone on set have said, "hey wait a minute, this motel wouldn't have any air vents, because it's a cheap motel with A/C units on the outside?" Why didn't anyone think of that? Clearly, it ruined the movie.

And what about all of the anachronisms in the film. It's set in the 80s, but there are cars from the 90s in several scenes, Carla Jean says she worked for Wal-Mart but there weren't any in the area at the time, modern smoke detectors in the motels, etc, etc, etc. There are so many anachronisms it would take too long to list them all.

My point isn't that "No Country for Old Men" is flawed, but that these kind of trivialities are a waste of an intelligent person's time. If you're actually noticing these kinds of things, and you care about these things enough that it detracts from the movie, then the movie has failed in some way. These kinds of mistakes didn't bother me in Dark Knight; I honestly didn't notice them, because I was caught up in the movie. It's never these mistakes that ruin a movie; you can honestly find similar problems in just about any movie ever made. The problem was some other flaw in the characters or the plot that ruined it.

My real problem with this blog though is why are you focusing so hard on Dark Knight? Can you honestly say you weren't biased against the film before even seeing it? The only people I know that tend to focus on tiny mistakes like this and act as though they've ruined a movie are people who tend to hate or disapprove of anything that's too popular. I find it rather demeaning of you to say 'Every moment is more idiotic than the last', when there are so many people who enjoyed this movie. You're essentially calling those who enjoyed it idiots, because they don't scrutinize a movie with every minuscule banality as you do.

If you're going to be a good critic and scrutinize a movie honestly, you should focus on the aspects of the movie that actually matter; what was it about the characters or the story that didn't engross you, that didn't allow you to become involved enough that you ignored the fantastic/implausible elements of the plot? Don't waste our time by focusing on garbage like 'why would there be a line of buses alongside the bank?', 'how did the joker immediately get a gap to get his bus into the line of buses?', 'how come the bus wasn't damaged after crashing into the bank?' These are the kinds of discussions I expect from sophomoric fan-boys of the comics that complain about every minute detail of the movie that does not precisely match the Batman they knew in print. Because really, if you're going to go down this road, if you're going to nitpick about minor details in a movie, then I suggest you begin with the movies you love, rather than the movies you hate. I'd rather ruin a few movies you enjoyed with trivial junk than have you try to ruin a movie I enjoyed.

The bus scene is unrealistic? Hardly. Here is a similar situation, caught on film in Hartford, Connecticut:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_E3ldpFbjo

And from China:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfYWsx_9Fb0

In the first film, the accident occurs at 0:25; it takes another twenty-five seconds for any real response to occur; in the second film, there /is/ no response, save from the traffic block, and this only occurred due to the placement of the event.

In your selected scene from TDK, any strong reaction to the event would have been unrealistic; the fact is, most do not care for others' tragedy. The only /real/ error in this scene is the relative intactness of the bus.

You dislike the movie, yet you have an article on it every other day. You even spend much of your time analyzing the movie, yet you dislike it.

Pathetic.

JE: Yes, because if one dislikes something one should never analyze it or spend time trying to explain why. That would be pathetic.

After reading about the fall of Troy, did you ask "Would the Trojans, encircled and besieged by the savage Greek army for years, really accept a giant wooden horse without asking who it was from?"

If you pull at that thread, the whole tapestry will unravel.

It seems to me that the only fair requirement for a comic book movie is that it be internally consistent within the framework established by the story, and I found TDK to be so. I followed every step of the plot on the first viewing, fwiw.

Hi Jim Emerson,

Although I don't have much to say about TDK - I'll admit I was entertained for my money - I saw this quote on the board...

"The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything."
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

...and it immediately made me think of two individuals more interesting than the Joker: Albert Camus, who had much to say about the absurd, and Ernest Hemingway, who once said that all thinking men were atheists.

Like I said, I don't have much to say about TDK...

Sure, the bus scene is not quite logical, but it works both a a punchline and a way to establish the Joker's character. I've always felt that you shouldn't let reality get in the way of a good story. I don't just suspend my disbelief when I go see a movie (especially a comic book movie), I have it drawn and quartered. After all, Star Wars would have been a lot less fun if it stuck to the laws of physics.

Having said that, there is defintely a somewhat ambivalent realtionship between the more fantastical elements of the Dark Knight and the movie's desire to be more "realistic" than other comic book movies.

The police are responding to a silent alarm. They don't know what the circumstances are, they just know a bank is being robbed.

Whatever else is being argued about the merits of the scene, this is clearly wrong: The Joker's man on the roof interecepts the silent alarm before it goes out, and even if he hadn't, he explicitly states that it was going to a private number, not 911. Police can only be responding to a report of shots fired or a bus accident, within the context of the scene.

As for some of the other particulars, I'm not too bothered by the bus not showing any damage when it pulls out -- it doesn't show any when it backs into the bank entrance, either. I'd imagine that a steel school bus is somewhat stronger than a pair of wooden doors.

The cops turning where they do doesn't bother me, either -- if they arrived on-scene and saw a giant hole in the wall, then what I know of police procedure would require them to pull to the curb and cordon off that hole.

I like Scorsese's advice that when you first see a film you should try to avoid analysis and go with your gut feeling, then save analysis for the second viewing. As this is not usually the practice for critics who must screen hundreds of films and get reviews out for print or post it behooves the critic to combine a bit of both, gut and analysis.

I can recall thinking in the theater 'Is this what all the hype was about' and at the same time 'Man, they sure did a good job on that viral marketing campaign.' And also, 'Why are there so many belly laughs at the Joker, I understand he's supposed to be funny but you'd think it was Richard Pryor on screen.' This was a film invented by its audience, one that was there because it was there to see the biggest movie of all time. It had little to do with its plot or inconsistencies in continuity. You have spoken before of the 'event' feeling of the film overtaking its actual value and I confess to being influenced, perhaps unduly, by not the attitude of the viral marketing campaign but by the attitude of disappointment in my summer blockbuster spec-tac-u-lar. I felt like I had been duped by a carnival barker proclaiming the greatest show on earth to only see malnourished tigers purring rather than growling at their tamer. Is it a lack of style, or rather an attempt and failure at a style. I found Batman Begins much more infuriating as far as the staging of action sequences went. They were quite underwhelming and far too choppy, self-conscious even. I remember piecing the '89 Batman together for missing bits of info, things easily overlooked in big-budget movies I suppose. A kid is much more willing to allow these things to happen and do the work of the filmmaker. Kids will be much more forgiving, I know I was. When I was a kid if you put a Bat on anything in particular I would be there begging my parents to get if for me. Thus the power of Superheros over children...of all ages.

So in the above shot I would say the pacing with the bus actually being able to drive away from crashing through a mob-fortified bank would be unbelievable. The fact that mobsters would allow anything short of crashing a bus through a bank to prevent theft is probable. The fact that there was only one mob-affiliated manager with a shotgun also improbable. The fact that the Joker has, and in all likely-hood will continue to, robbed a bank in a ludicrous manner seems about right. But I think it comes down to Nolan coming to terms intellectually with dealing with a superhero. He will, on the one hand, go to great lengths to establish Batman's gadgets as having a real world application or military application so as to justify it he will make leaps in logic that would make the Hulk jealous. Upon my second viewing of the film I enjoyed it quite a bit more, for reasons purely my own, not political either. It seems the filmmakers are performing a bit of anarchy on the current state of world affairs in this film, reassigning roles to participants, exchanging tactics, illiciting an unusual examination of this in philosophic terms. Not to imply its insightful or smart, but daring and bold, poking at a lumbering beast of consequences. I did enjoy it more the second time, minus the audience. And Ledger's performance was a bit underwhelming. Anarchy.

HA!

Jim Emmerson seems to believe he's a film critic..

JE: Yes. It's what film critics do.

as I remember it, you're not a film critic..but thank you for your non-stop quest to try and rip a hugely successful film apart..

JE: That's right. If it's "hugely successful" a film critic shouldn't actually look at the movie.

JE: That's right. If it's "hugely successful" a film critic shouldn't actually look at the movie.

What annoys me about a lot of critics and The Dark Knight is that a number of them DID voice some reservations when it first came out, but now that it's a big hit they prudently keep quiet, or worse, consider their opinions invalidated by the hype and switch sides. I remember that a similar situation happened with Gladiator: more than one critic saw when it was released that it was just a Summer blockbuster in antiquity clothes, but Roger was the only one who kept reminding people of that up to the evening of the Academy Awards.

But thank you for keeping at it, the way you (rightly) did with The Departed. And for not letting the STFU folks here get you down.

So, here are the 5 biggest problems I have with the movie.

5. What the hell is Scarecrow doing in this movie? He seems to be thrown in so randomly. It was a well-written and interesting character in the first one, and now he's thrown in in a way that only seems like the second scene with the first one explaining it somehow on the cutting room floor. It's basically "How do we give a wink and a nod to people who liked the first one? Well Scarecrow's still alive, let's throw him in a parking lot small-batch drug deal that Batman busts up. I'm sure no one will wonder what he's doing there, or why Batman is interested in this one small nickel-and-dime deal then goes back to fighting roving painted lunatics."

I mean, for all the sense of having him in the scene, he might as well have gotten out of the van and said "It's the Scarecrow. With my friends Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, do you want this dimebag?"

4. All that running around must make him breathless. Enough already with Bruce Wayne / Batman heavy breathing. Is he a superhero or a phone sex operator?

3. Joker's motivations (or lack thereof). I guess having a villain who isn't doing it for any REASON... someone who's just flat-out maniacal, is a little different. Though as an audience member you still feel a bit cheated by not having a rationale. But you can't really simultaneously be calculating but without a purpose, mad but organized, interested only in chaos yet trying to protect yourself... In Silence of the Lambs, you don't see Buffalo Bill being concerned with how he's going to make his house payments, it just makes for a more confusing character, not a deeper one. And hell even he had reasons, even if they were carnal. Hell, Nicholson's Joker was maniacal, but if you're gonna be insane you should be at least a little sloppy.

2. Maggie Gyllenhaal just seems bored. She acts the same around her life long love as she does Commissioner Gordon as she does the Joker. She seems disinterested and devoid of emotion. Great movie heroines, you can tell what their thoughts and hopes and emotions are even if you had the sound off. Here, you can't even tell what she wants. Ingrid Bergman could have single-handedly ruined Casablanca if she'd been this blank throughout.

1. The end of Batman Begins

Ra's al Ghul: Have you finally learned to do what is necessary?
Bruce Wayne: I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you.

How are you going to have Dark Knight be about whether Batman's willing to off a baddie if he's already made that decision in the first one?

Jim,
Don't you remember what a film critic is supposed to do: agree with me when I'm right and appear silly when I think you're wrong!

I'm confused why so many people are irritated by any discussion about the flaws in this movie. TDK was the most talked about film of 2008 and its unrealisic to think that this level of infamy can come without some scrutiny as well.

This scene is a good starting point as it is fairly typical of some of the inconsistencies found later on in the movie. As Jim has pointed out, these inconsistencies aren't just technical errors but visual contradictions to the broader themes the film tries to express.


I got to reading this blog a little too late and I believe that most of the errors in the clip have been pretty thouroughly pointed out already and I look forward to the next 'exercise' where it will hopefully become more apparent that mistakes were made in this movie that are more significant than simply continuity errors.


One thing before Jim posts Quiz #2. A lot has been made of some of the 'contradictions' of the Joker and what he represents. It's often pointed out that he critcizes Batman, Gordon, etc. for being plotters and schemers while he appears to be one himself. The usual response to this is that he is simply lying to manipulate Dent. I'd like to play the devil's advocate and offer another theory which is that perhaps the Joker puts several 'traps' for lack of better word, out into the world and hopes for the best. There was poison in the commissioner's bottle of booze but maybe there was some on his toothbrush at home or there was a bomb in his car also. I believe that he would be capable of doing this if I am supposed to believe that he pulled off the heist the way that he did in the movie. The problem is that that kind of power contradicts the very real and material universe in which these characters exist so I guess this theory maybe works on some levels but not on others.

I think Jim Emmerson may very well be the new Joker.

JE: Yes! And you complete me!

Okay, people are thinking about this way too much. Consider the scene in spiderman 2 where the car is thrown ant Peter Parker and Mary Jane threw the window of the coffee shop. In context of the story this utterly makes no sense, since the only reason the two of them survive this is because he is spiderman and able to react quick enough to save him and her, but in the story Doc Ock does not know he is spiderman and so was throwing a car at two people with the purpose of apparently just getting their attention as he then kidnaps one in order to interrogate the other. My point is that while this makes no sense, in context of the movie I was willing to ignore it in favor of enjoying the movie. The Dark Knight has been seen extensively by myself and I have been witnessed to the phenomenon. What I have concluded is that much of the story doesn't really work, but that's mainly because the whole idea of batman doesn't work within a real world setting. This is just a close approximation to how it might possibly look if Batman was more in the world. Ultimately whether this is a good movie or not depends on the criteria one wishes to apply, I could point to logical contradictions and flaws in plot for any movie. Even Casablanca doesn't really make any sense. Just because someone has a pass doesn't mean the Nazis are just going to let them leave. There are plenty of problems in any given movie, none more so then the Dark Knight, I simply applaud its willingness to go for broke on pretty much every aspect, but to try and make batman believable is a futile effort, but I think Nolan knows that. Why else would he have Batman jumping off buildings and using tech that doesn't exist. That batpod was almost impossible to ride for motor cycle experts they brought in to ride it, but it looks cool in the movie, and if one is willing to accept the base premise, then it is silly to argue logic after that. And perhaps the script doesn't even need to because the audience is already on board because they came to see a batman movie. Something can not make sense in a movie, as long as the audiance doesn't catch on and as long as the story doesn't revolve to heavily around it. This movie may not deserve all the hype it has been getting, but I had fun, so did many other people, and it asked more difficult questions then films like this usually do. That's all I need to know.

The Joker doesn't make plans; he is a Calvinist, and nothing is God.

JE: Jeez, who rigged all those bombs then? Calvin? Or Hobbes? How does he know when they're s'posed to go off?

I watched the movie last week for the first time, and was thoroughly disappointed. While I could forgive the implausible turns such as the puzzle with the school buses - although it required quite a stretch of movie-fantasia forgiveness - most disappoinment for me came from the fact that I could't follow the story. It was dark and gloomy as it always is in Gotham, but I couldn't see who was kicking and who was being kicked for most of the time, the corrupt police officers resembled all other police officers like siblings and I never knew who I was watching on the screen - a new batch, are these corrupt or not, is it possible that not one had any courage - and although I knew that Batman was going to come out alive, everything was happening so fast, with most time in the film spent on people and objects moving very fast, all the while Joker restating his point about chaos, when in fact he conjured up some magic tricks of destruction out of thin air, since the skill and organisation for all that would have required an army of very clever and focused people instead of some thugs and mental patients. I too felt very sad aboout Heath Ledger. He did a good job, but this was not art, just grotesque.

I found one good scene in the film, given enough time to tell its point. When the prisoner on the boat comes to the chief of guards and convinces him to give him the key, and then he proceeds to throw it out the window. There are plenty of films which have only one redeeming scene, but to have 2 1/2 hours and rush through as if you needed 5 hours to tell the story... - I don't know. It's too bad, I was really looking forward to it.

So I'm supposed to answer your quiz before reading your text after the jump as well as the slew of comments?

Well, I'm sure it was already been addressed, but I'm not sure if you're getting at the plausibility of the setup (the robbery would have to end as school let out, which is plausible—the idea that no one would notice the bus driving out of the bank being considerably less plausible) or the spacial distortions of the shot—it's unclear in the context of the single shot where the bus is coming from, and how the bank's position relates to the main scene. In regards to the latter, It's not uncommon for movies to "cheat" in these sorts of things, although a longer shot might have been more gratifying.

Regarding the former, his bus wouldn't have had school children on it, and probably would have been noticed if the cops knew what to look for. They might have even turned around and caught the bus, or something.

Did I get it right? Do I win something!?!

I guess now I'll go read what this quiz was all about.

I love how responses that disagree with Jim tend to fall into one of two categories:
1- You have good points, but I just felt like the movie was good, so I went with the feelings that the movie generated, despite the conflict that might cause with a rational look at the film.
2- You are wasting your time by pointing out flaws in a movie that I and other people like.
The first values intangible gut emotions over analysis and reason. The second presumes that there is a personality disorder affecting Jim's discussion decisions. These are both incredibly stupid ways to discuss a movie. If you value TDK, then tell me what it says that you feel has truth, and explain how it says it in ways that don't involve ignoring essential evidence on the other side. If you are going to argue that TDK is a great film, then you are going to have to reconcile that greatness with what many feel is a general ineptitude in the technical aspects of the action scenes. Other action films have done their action much better, and I don't think this is really a subjective point.
Oh, and Barnaby, the Trojans do question the horse. Read The Aeneid.

Where drama begins, logic ends - Alfred Hitchcock

I adore this movie and love this sequence, although not because it seems realistic, which it doesn't. If this bank robbery had been the centerpiece of the film, appearing at the midway point, we probably would have been privy to many scenes involving the planning, i.e. Ocean's 11. (I love all the Ocean's movies, but those are just as implausible if not moreso than this sequence).

Yes, logistically, the bank robbery as executed is hogwash in reality. 5 guys taking on the entire bank the way they do is impossible. It seems as though there are 10 people in the whole bank, and all of them are on the banking floor. One could argue that since its a "mob bank", security will be far different than in a normal bank (who needs a staff guarding the vault when you've got Willy Fitchner packing a shotgun?!). But since it is the prologue to the movie, it works both for its brevity and for one key element that really develops ths Joker.

In this scene, we witness what makes the Joker different from a normal villain. A standard baddie would steal the money with all the boys, and then kill them all himself, walking away with the money. The Joker instructs each baddie to kill another baddie. Just like with the hospital and ferry sequences later, he is scary not because he threatens to kill you but because he makes you kill someone else. He only kills one of the men, yet they all end up dead. That's one of the elements in this movie that I love; every death, even of minute or non-characters, means something more than when guys are popped off in your standard Schwarzenegger flick.

Lastly, I couldn't agree more with Karlos' assessment of the Joker's character through those two pivotal moments. The Joker and Batman are both trying to prove opposite points about human nature, and you really see that in Ledger's eyes when neither ferry blows up.

Jim,

Damn it, don't you know that people only go to the movies to have fun? And that means all people. Every single one of them. Every one goes to a movie for the exact same reason and this only leads me to think you are, in fact, a sleeper agent for an invading alien army. Because no Earthling would ever do something silly like "analyze" a movie.

You've blown your cover. Your superiors will be angry.

"I found watching Heath Ledger's performance very sad: It's a good performance, not a great one (it's repetitive, building or stretching toward nothing), and I'm sorry he's not around to give us some better ones, as I'm sure he would have."

Gag.

This is a thinly-veiled attempt for Stephanie Zacharek to appear wildly contrarian and edgy--perhaps "going against the grain." It's just arrogant. Why don't we ask the actors who shared the screen with Heath and the actors who nominated him for a Screen Actors Guild award whether they think his performance is "good, not great"? There's always been something especially aggravating about persnickety, pseudo-intellectual, obscure film critics who try to gain an audience by appearing hard-to-please. Someone with an idea of the craft of acting, however, such as any of the actors who have probably already marked their ballots for Heath at this year's SAG awards, can give a much better verdict of what a "great" performance is. Oh, Stephanie--you're straining, honey, and it's obvious.

[insert 8 to 10 paragraphs extolling the coherence of The Dark Knight or else the ridiculousness of wanting coherence in a comic book film here]

[insert sentence about how film critic shouldn't be wasting time by writing 8 to 10 paragraphs denigrating coherence of The Dark Knight or else extolling the virtue of coherence in comic book, or any kind, of film here]

[remind self to start own blog in the morning here]

As others have noted, the comic book story, by its very nature, demands that we accept the implausible, and often the impossible, as our reality.

Therefore, it is not possible to strip TDK of this element without turning it into something other than it is. Despite it's intent to stick with reality (for the most part) and stay away from supernatural phenomena, you can't expect it to play like an episode of Law and Order.

When I am watching a comic book movie, I do not expect it to be plausible. However, I hope that it will at least be possible (that is to say, internally consistent within the rules it has established for itself). In this respect, the Joker's elaborate schemes, however implausible, are always technically possible, even within the rules set in real life, which is enough for me.

Any work of art is a balancing act. You cannot add one element without compromising another element, at least a little. Force a character like the Joker or Batman to operate within the strict confines of what is plausible and you strip them of what makes them so compelling.

So we accept the trade-off that the filmmaker has made knowing that in doing so, he has made a better movie.

Jim, I am so glad Roger Ebert returned to his website to continue posting his reviews instead of your shallow criticisms. Word by word, your analysis of The Dark Knight sounds like it came out of C3-PO's point of view. First of all, why are you giving us the script to read the Joker's original plan to escape the bank? Only geeks and film students do that kind of stuff, not the general audience. Haven't you at least thought that the sole purpose of the heist was to introduce the Joker and justify how the villain acquired a ridiculously large amount of money in order to buy his artillery, explosives, and costume? He had to get his money somehow and the writers chose the Joker would rob a bank. End of story! How many times have you seen a couple of cheats here and there in ANY movie? Steven Spielberg's films are flocked with cheats and still his movies are successful! It's a REQUISITE to go past the laws of physics and time. A movie isn't REALITY, it's an OPTICAL ILLUSION! The point in building up a scene is to make it look a way the audience can say "I buy this" not "this is one-hundred percent correct". If there's no entertainment, there's no reason to keep the scene! This is an ACTION movie, and for that particular reason the director HAD to make a fast-paced editing, he had to cut out material sp the audience keeps up with the film's speedy emotion! How can you agree with that Stephanie Zachareck (I hope she quits her job, seriously) that this film wasn't "visually dazzling"? A film shot with an I-Max camera didn't thrill you enough to see a truck flipping over, a plane pulling up Batman by a wire, and a car chase in a tunnel? I seriously don't wanna know what her taste in movies because I'm afraid I'll laugh to death. The Joker's dialog too expositional, repetitive, and impossible to decipher what were his true intentions? For God's sake, he's crazy! But what we find interesting is how he does things! Perhaps you didn't do your research on the Joker's first appearance in the 1930's comics: the Joker was so tormented in his early years he has no recollection of what happened and that's why he changes his lifestories. Not only it's in the early comics, it's also psychologically true.

I know some people found the film "incomprehensible". Didn't it ever occur to you it was a trick on behalf of the director in order to get you to see it again? I understood it fully the first time I watched it, perhaps The Dark Knight wasn't a movie for the whole audience, but take this for example: children and teenagers obviously didn't take it, but as they mature they will comprehend the storyline. I bet that nine out of ten in a group of kids ENJOYED the movie even though they didn't understand what was going on! And there's proof--the movie made money like crazy! If no one enjoyed it, The Dark Knight wouldn't have beaten Mama Mia's box office score! Gene Siskel, may he rest in peace, and Roger Ebert are perhaps the only critics that not only write reviews for a living but know a movie needs to be fun to watch one way or another. If it isn't, what's the point of going to the movies! But, of course, you don't make money making movies, but by analyzing them like an anti-social mathematician in a college library. In my most sincere opinion, sir, I think if Simon Cowell were in the film business instead of music, he would give the Dark Knight a standing ovation.

P.S. I had difficulties downloading the script. Even though I couldn't fully study your point, I still stand by everything I said. Thank God filmmakers and actors are those who earn the success, not critics.

P.P.S. I bet ten bucks this long comment of mine won't be posted. Who's in?

JE: Thanks for steering clear of an ad hominem attacks and staying so sharply focused on the evidence of what is on the screen in the movie. There's nothing I can say to refute, or even address, what you say here.

What exactly is it that people think film critics do if not criticize movies? Why is that after the court of public opinion has passed judgement on a film any dissension from that opinion is immediately dismissed as 'persnickety' and 'pseudo-intellectual' to use Sean's flowery language?

"All that matters is what is on the screen at any given moment. Everything else is conjecture."

As someone who studies film, you should know that this is blatantly false. The definition of montage is two images that when juxtaposed, reveal some unseen third meaning. That's what every shot of every movie does, barring the rare single-shot film. The entirety of reading and reacting to film is conjecture.

You're usually one of my favorite critics, but your responses to The Dark Knight have increasingly explored lands devoid of logic, reason and good sense. These essays sound more like personal vendetta than rational analysis. You're not going to like The Dark Knight; fine. It would be more interesting to hear why from the man who wrote such compelling analysis of Donnie Darko and Fight Club, not someone reacting in kind to fanboy abuse.

JE: Yes, I certainly did not mean to suggest that each shot, or each frame of film, needs to be considered separately from all the others. That would be absurd. But you do have to look at what is on the screen. When you see one shot, followed by another, that juxtaposition means something, or suggests something, because of those particular images. Once you start making things up that aren't supported by what's IN the movie, you're no longer talking about the movie, you're just making things up about it. Sure, people will have different interpretations, but they have to be based on what's there, on the screen. I could say that, for example, Commissioner Loeb was dying of cancer and hired the Joker to kill him, and to kill the judge and the DA to cover it up for insurance reasons, but I don't see any reason to believe that because I don't see anything in the movie to suggest or support that reading.

What puzzles me more than anything in this film is the question of why 'buses' is spelt with only two esses.

Seems to me that 'bus' is a perfect example of the one-one-one rule. Is it just me?

JE: I'm so glad you mentioned that. Again: It's all about close reading. My spellcheck flagged it, too, so I looked it up and the American Heritage Dictionary says either is OK. It's a matter of taste: I've always liked the two esses in the middle, and I decided to stick with 'em! "Buses" looks like "booses" to me. "Busses" looks like "fusses" -- although, I admit, I can't make too much of a "fus" about it...

Wait, so they don't actually show the bus leaving the bank? I take back everything I said about "The Dark Knight". It is obviously terrible.

Jim you strike me as the kind of critic who goes into a movie trying not to like it. It must win you over from scratch by appealing to an apparently exclusive criteria of aesthetics. This is neither professional, nor enjoyable criticism to read. Good critics want to like the movies they see. A movie starts in the middle and swings either way. It does not start at rock bottom and have to climb out of a hole. This anti-"Dark Knight" quibble you've started is not film criticism. It is a juvenile vendetta against a good film that triumphed in spite of your influence and dwarfed your opinion.

P.S. Remember that scene in "Casablanca" when they shoot the guy in the street? NO BULLET HOLE APPEARS! Man, that movie sucked.

JE: Why can't you talk about the actual movie, and what I wrote about it, instead of your unsupported opinion of what you think my opinion is? Then you might understand that opinions can be based on observations, not preconceptions. I may as well say you decided you loved the movie before you saw a frame of it. If I tell you the truth, that I was looking forward to this movie tremendously and came away disappointed, would that matter? No, it wouldn't, because you could simply choose not to believe me anyway. If that's what film criticism is to you, indulge yourself.

Re: "P.S. Remember that scene in "Casablanca" when they shoot the guy in the street? NO BULLET HOLE APPEARS! Man, that movie sucked."

If Michael Curtiz had chosen to dolly in on the bullet hole that wasn't there it would have been a different matter entirely.

Boy, when it comes to The Dark Knight, time sure doesn't heal the knee-jerk vitriol.

Fight the power compadre Emerson!

Go get 'em, Jim.

Although I enjoyed TDK when I saw it at the cinema, I can't understand all the talk about "masterpiece" or "greatest film in the history of mankind." (Okay, maybe no one actually said that last one.) Surely the film is at best just an entertaining superhero movie, no? There is certainly a place in our world for such things. But they don't have to win Oscars or critics awards to have value, right?

Hi Jim,

I'm a semi-regular reader of your blog and, though I find I don't agree with your reviews/opinions about half the time, I do find the blog entertianing in terms of sparking debate. The posts you inspire are always interesting and fun to read. As a fan of TDK(Yes, it is one of my favorite films of the year. No, it's not the greatest movie ever made - not by a long shot), my initial urge was to agree with the posts that have been accusing you of nitpicking a movie you didn't like - as if you were trying to convince the rest of us idiots that the movie is objectively bad. But I've had such a good time reading the back and forth on TDK that I am once again reminded whey I read your blog in the first place - you do spark debate. So here's my 2 cents...
I'm a firm believer that experiencing a film is first and foremost, an emotional experience. Afterwards (or during), our intellect formulates answers as to why we are having an emotional reaction to a given film - whether that be good, bad or nothing (There is a special place in hell reserved for films that elicit no emotional reaction. I'll take a horrible movie over a bland movie any day. Post "Almost Famous" Kate Hudson, I'm looking at you.) Having read most of your TDK posts, I get that you didn't like the movie (your opinion of it seems to be lowering every day). That's all well and good. If we all agreed on everything the world (the internet especially) would be a boring place. But these "quizes" of yours seem to be to be out of order - coming from an intellect-first prespective instead of a gut-first perspective. A movie doesn't fail/succeed soley based on these surface trappings you are highlighting. These are the more shallow things someone might focus on if their gut told them the didn't like the movie. OK, we don't actually see the bus coming out of the bank. So... what? It's impossible to believe that a cop exists that would EVER consider throwing the Joker his gun to prevent his friend's death? Really? These can't be the reasons you didn't like the movie (I give you more credit than a friend of mine who sited "Batman's stupid voice" as the reason he didn't like the film). If so, then it really must not have engaged you on any level at all. But it must have or you wouldn't have spent so much time discussing it here. These "quizes" almost seem like a fishing expedition for you to figure out why you reacted so negatively to the film. Since you didn't write a full review (I don't think you did. Please forgive me if I missed it), exactly what WAS your emotional experience in watching the movie, other than disappointment? Did it move you in any way? Did it work up to a point and then stop working for you (That was my own reaction to Batman Begins)? Did you connect to any character? Did it frighten you? Did it thrill you? Did it entertain you in any way? Where there character arcs that were satisfying and others that felt incomplete/unresolved? Or did you spend two and a half hours dissecting shot composition and counting awkward cuts? This is not me being accusing, it's just genuine curiosity - I want to know a little more why you didn't like the film. I enjoy comparing/contrasting negative viewpoints of movies that I love - but this surface level of nitpicking you've been focusing on lately doesn't cut it. If these in fact ARE the reasons you didn't like the movie, then we really don't interact with films in even remotely the same way. But it would explain a lot more your devotion the Coens. I love them too but sometimes thier perfectly told, hermetically sealed cinematic packages can stifle the humanity of their characters and stories. Sometimes movies need to be a little messy.

Aright alright alright, let's talk about the actual movie, particularly this moment we've been assigned.

Noted. We have a line of buses driving down the street conveniently alongside and during the bank robbery, and even more conveniently with a gap in the line that the Joker fills with his "getaway" bus. He's shot everyone else involved but we know they were only temporary grunts because he has others assisting him later who bring his "dead" body in for a reward. So we can safely assume that the line of buses was planned and (even though unusually) well-timed. We can take note, however, that that line of buses was extremely long, and it is plausible that the bus that arrived at this exact point as the Joker was ready to pull out simply slowed and allowed him into the line, just in time for a red light, which doesn't matter.

You asked us to take note of the debris falling off the bus. I don't really see you bothering to mention that unless you think it's in some way wrong or out of place, but the moment right before the clip you've posted (conveniently excluded) shows the entire street level entrance as a large wood and glass structure. This shouldn't seem out of place, as all the counters in the bank lobby were of the same color of wood. We don't actually see the bus leaving the bank, but that's monumentally insignificant, as we already know that it IS leaving a bank. We see the bus enter the bank, and we see it pull out onto the street. I'm capable of filling in the blanks.

As for the cops, they may or may not have had a near enough angle to see the bus join the line. That one's fairly subjective. We can note, however, that the dust as ceased to emanate from the bus by the time the cops come up on it.

The real issue here, and maybe this is what you were shooting for, is that the bus appears to be pulling out of a bank that is located in the middle of the street. As the camera pans out, we can see that the bus appears to be in the center of an intersection, even though it has not yet begun to turn. But again, monumentally insignificant. And again, if this is what derailed your opinion of it, than you are simply trying too hard not to like it.

JE: Thank you. This gives us a basis on which to have some kind of exchange. (I've been trying to imagine an argument that begins: "You only pointed that out because you liked the movie!") As I say, the dust would not be a significant distraction if you assume all the bus drivers are by hired by the Joker and show up when they do as an exquisitely timed part of his plan. My question would be: Why did the filmmakers deliberately add the sound of children to the soundtrack? They would not have done it unless they felt it needed to be done, so what were the reasons? Are we meant to think that these are regular schoolbusses (I like two esses) with Joker-hired drivers -- either substitutes or the regular drivers who have been paid off? Now, I'm not saying any of these things HAVE to bother you that much, but I do think the shot goes out of its way to call attention to these questions.

On a semi-off-topic note: I swear I've seen this schoolbus trick done before in some other movie. Ring a (school) bell with anyone?

I agree with Rollie, and your vitriolic reply didn't change my opinion, Jim.

Jim

I see you challenged Rollie above. I think you were a tad harsh on him -- I think he was making a comment about your perspective on movies generally rather than this one particularly. I do think he has a point -- you are definitely harder to please than most critics. Which is actually an admirable thing in some ways. But sometimes I DO get the impression that you begin cynical, then make the movie have to work like hell to gain your approval.

As for the shot above, I really don't see what your problem is. You can see that as the bus exits the bank, it is in the middle of an intersection. The driver behind may have been distracted by the commotion going on at the bank, too distracted to notice the bus leave from the doorway. Before you make that argument that speculation on what MIGHT have happened is not what ACTUALLY happened, I offer you this counter-argument -- the film offers no real evidence to the contrary, so speculations that are not contradicted by what is on-screen are possibilities. Someone before offered the hypothesis that the Joker hired one or two 'crazies' to drive the vehicles in front of and behind his own bus. Given that later in the film, we find out that the Joker has hired escaped mental asylum inmates, that hypothesis is most certainly possible.

I agree that the above shot is a little unlikely and maybe even slightly contrived, but Nolan has covered himself sufficiently for this several-second grab of the film.

As for your problems with Nolan's visual style, it is exactly that -- a style. Nolan deliberately doesn't provide us with every single little piece of information in a shot. Extraneous narrative information, such as how the Joker overpowers the police officer in the jail, and why the busses (buses?) don't notice that a school bus has emerged from the bank don't REALLY matter in the film's greater goals.

On a side-note: I like your site a lot, Jim. I have a link to it on my web site and really enjoy your writing, despite the fact I disagree with you three times out of four. As a comment from a friend and follower, I'd be careful with this whole "Dark Knight dissection" thing. I also love going through movies shot by shot, and agree that that is what true film criticism is -- getting past the surface to work out what a film is actually ABOUT and why it makes us feel the way it does. But in this case, and particularly the way you've written about it thus far, it could well seem to some people that you're trying to make them look stupid for deigning to think that The Dark Knight is a good film. Those who don't know better would think you're being smug, superior and condescending. Replies like the one to Rollie above don't help.

Jonathan

Wow, Jim, you really do hate this film. I won't even comment on the actual scene with the school bus, it didn't bother me at all, other than a flashing thought of, "hey, good timing." Part of the mystique of Nolan's Gotham is the occasional stretch of reality -- in Batman Begins, how does the Scarecrow see through his loose mask so well? Otherwise, to point something out to you, Commissioner Loeb's DNA is found on the Joker card, along with the judge's and Harvey Dent's, NOT his finger prints. Gordon even goes so far as to suggest that his DNA was taken from a tissue or a glass, right as the Commissioner is drinking. So, no, not everyone has to touch the card in order to be marked. The idea that the Joker's henchmen would run around to recover the card whenever it's touched is ridiculous. The Joker card in the judge's paperwork is used as a tool, a screenwriting tool, a visual stimulant for the viewer to recognize a the judge other than by her name, since she is such a minor character. Dent is major, and the Commissioner is close to Gordon, so he actually has some dialogue and needs no other introduction, other than the brief appearance in the Mayor's office. But by showing the judge with the Joker card, we as an audience see that she has been marked, and it becomes more significant because she is the judge at the trial against all the mobsters. Dent clarifies later that no other judge in the city will even hear the case, reinforcing that this one particular judge is an ally. Visual keys and clues, the screenwriter's friends. On a more personal note, I wonder why THIS film in particular causes such frustration and anger from you. Is it because it made so much money? Is it because it is garnering some serious awards consideration? DO you have a personal vendetta against Christopher Nolan? How about you deconstruct The Curious Case of Benjamin Button next? Or The Silence of the Lambs, or Titanic? We're all valued for our opinions, or disagreements with arguments and reasons for our arguments, but at the end of the day I think you're viewing The Dark Knight with the motivation of deconstructing it, rather than enjoying it. yes, that is what a film critic does, but I find some of your commentary to be insulting the people in the audience who actually enjoyed the film and choose NOT to over-analyze it. If I am happy with the bus sequence, with the film in general (holes, warts, inconsistencies and all) please do not insult me as a moviegoer.

JE: Thanks for those clarifications about the card and the DNA. I never hated the film before (I thought it was pretty forgettable), but I feel I'm being pushed in that direction. That's no doubt my defensive reaction to others' defensive reactions, and I'm trying (and clearly failing at times) to keep focused on the movie itself. I've found that people DO feel insulted when I point out something I consider a flaw in this movie. That's something I want to explore further. Some people have said, "Yes, I see what you don't like about that shot, but it didn't bother me." OK. I'm not insulted by that. I AM insulted when I am told that by caring about the way a shot is executed in a movie, or saying that I think it would have worked better if it had been done differently (and then, not being vague but actually suggesting other options) that I'm being "petty," "nitpicky," "wasting time," practicing "bad film criticism" or just so unable to control my hatred of the movie that I feel the urge to stage some kind of "vendetta" against it. Those are all non-arguments that have nothing to do with the movie or what I wrote about it. Do I have the power to CHANGE the movie simply by pointing out something specific that it contains and giving my evaluation of it? Does anybody else? Does the movie even have an independent existence apart from all these emotional "opinions" people are throwing around? Like the movie. Show us what you like about it instead of saying that criticism of it is based on not liking it. That makes no sense.

"JE: Thank you. This gives us a basis on which to have some kind of exchange. (I've been trying to imagine an argument that begins: "You only pointed that out because you liked the movie!") As I say, the dust would not be a significant distraction if you assume all the bus drivers are by hired by the Joker and show up when they do as an exquisitely timed part of his plan. My question would be: Why did the filmmakers deliberately add the sound of children to the soundtrack? They would not have done it unless they felt it needed to be done, so what were the reasons? Are we meant to think that these are regular schoolbusses (I like two esses) with Joker-hired drivers -- either substitutes or the regular drivers who have been paid off? Now, I'm not saying any of these things HAVE to bother you that much, but I do think the shot goes out of its way to call attention to these questions.

On a semi-off-topic note: I swear I've seen this schoolbus trick done before in some other movie. Ring a (school) bell with anyone?"

There is one possibility that we have not yet explored and that is the fact that the camera only pans in one direction, and thus the sound of children could have also been children on the sidewalk outside of our field of vision, obviously walking away from us as the sound fades. But I do agree with you that the sound's very presence implies its own significance and so we must assume that the audio is related to the buSSes. So we can deduce from this that if the Joker hired drivers for the buSSes that those drivers either kidnapped/murdered and ten took the places of professional bus drivers or paid them off, as opposed to the Joker having some secret stockpile of getaway buSSes somewhere, which would ultimately be much more unlikely. Man, I feel bad for those good bus drivers.

On a similar note, don't you think it is wise to use school buSSes as a device to illustrate the extent to which the Joker has already penetrated the (waning) dignity of Gotham before the film has even started? Batman initially disregards the Joker as "just one man", but we know better. We already saw him join a very long line of school buSSes. They didn't just materialize. They came from somewhere. The Joker's got his hand in more places than the film can even explore. Now that's a terrifying thought. Or maybe it's a meditation on the growing anarchic tendencies of today's youth (noted sarcasm?).

Jim, honestly, I think you get too bogged down in unrealistic plot occurences that break your suspension of disbelief. You can claim this film tries to be realistic in a gritty sense, and that it "loses" you because it breaks "realistic" trends. The fact of the matter is that we all know it's a completely fabricated story.

Films are allowed to take liberties with reality, and if they do so even in the event that they may break your suspension of disbelief, there may be a reason. Spectatorship of great films should not be unproblematic; they should make us question, ponder, and engage us. Now, you might think, "Well, having a bus leaving a bank wall in broad daylight doesn't make sense...it couldn't happen and the writers are stupid for not having thought it out!!! My word!!"

And again, films are allowed to take liberties with reality. Not only that, film are especially allowed to if they may a thematic statement out of such a shot or sequence. As chaotically as the film began, so it ends in such calmness, showing the subversive veil behinds which the Joker hides. Perhaps the fact that the chaos the Joker manifests is so well hidden in that shot (of the buses) speaks of inner chaos within any person/community/etc. that can be provoked. This, in essence, could be a foreshadow for the Harvey Dent character.

So, what am I trying to say? Maybe these liberties in narrative are for a reason Jim! And even if Chris Nolan didn't mean what I said above, it's what the viewer takes from the scene. Forget all that "the scene doesn't work in real life, it doesn't make sense as a getaway plan, blahhhh".

From Stephanie Zacharek's article that you referred to in your post:

"I found watching Heath Ledger's performance very sad: It's a good performance, not a great one (it's repetitive, building or stretching toward nothing)..."

Repetitive? Maybe that's because he's playing the SAME CHARACTER. I must say I've never heard that as a criticism of a performance before. By the same token, Marlon Brando in The Godfather is repetitive because he speaks with the same intonation and moves with the same body language.

Perhaps Stephanie means that there was no catharsis or development with the Joker's character. Anyone who thinks the Joker should have either of those things completely missed the character's point.

Pretty simple, there appears to have been an open construction area (due to the wood you can see at the beginning of the shot), which the bus was originally parked in. It may have looked strange, but not illegal or worth gawking at for more than 3 seconds.

When the bus driver saw that the bus line was on its way, he backed through the wall. No dents on the bus because 1) the wall may not necessarily have been concrete, and 2) buses are extremely strong - I remember in elementary school, a pick-up truck had smashed into the side of a school bus, leaving the truck totally destroyed but the bus unscratched.

The bus driver, once Joker was in, signaled to the bus line that he was exiting the construction area, and another bus driver let him into the line. And yes, bus lines of that sort do exist in real life (I was part of them back in high school as the bus fleet all left at the same time).

I wondered about the plausibility of the scene myself when I saw the movie, but after thinking about it, it's not impossible, so it doesn't bother me that it's improbable. And if it does bother you, you're just straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel.

To begin with, I haven't watched the film since the night it was released on DVD, and the second time I just jumped to favourite scenes. Since, I've relaxed with Fargo(twice), Jackie Brown, 'Holy Grail and Star Wars, to name a few old friends. Maybe I'll need a TDK fix tomorrow, but I'm not thrashing it, and that surprised me, and says much.
But to your assignment.
The planning: The first word that comes to mind is 'resources'. When Joker is rampaging through the lives of the Bat and co. he has the backing of the Mob, and all that goes with it. Where he gets the personnel to pull this off, before they agree to his assistance, could be covered by his charisma and obsession. A small crew(around twenty, judging from the scene)isn't a great stretch, but one line of dialogue could've cleaned things up a bit, since it's made clear that his men haven't even seen him.
The Wall: There's a hole in the wall, with a bus in it. The bus comes out of it. I feel I may not have this "eye" you speak of; I took this shot as economy.
The Rest of the Shot: The bus is not shown waiting for the gap in the convoy, so it's a bit convenient. The Police even being there doesn't make sense, since the alarm was cut, and was going to the Mob anyway. And surely a school bus crashing into a building would bring an ambulance or two?
I don't get your problem with debris. The bus hit the building. I dont think the Police would have noticed some swirling gunk amid a line of yellow buses. And the traffic lights? Not exactly glaring, but I see what you mean, overall: Sloppy.
For the record, I think the shonky editing and the periodic lack of linear(is that the word?)detail was to shave seconds. It's just that it has a sense of "That'll do" to it, which is why it's negligent as opposed to experimental or stylised.
Thanks, had fun. Now I'll read the rest.

Another flaw that kills me is when the Joker and his crew crash the fundraiser party for Harvey Dent. You see the Joker and his thugs crash the party violently looking for Dent. Then after Batman jumps out the window to save Rachel we are then rushed to a different scene. So, whatever happened to the Joker and his crew at the party? Did they leave quietly or did they keep looking for Dent at the party?

Oh well, there are a lot of scenes in TDK that are left to assumption. It's certainly not the masterpiece that some have made it out to be.

You people are all right on top of this horrible tragedy. Who would have ever thought that in a film about a billionaire that dresses as a bat fighting a guy that dresses as a warped harlequin that there might be a lack of realism? And please spare me the jargon and filmobabble. That insipid, pompous bilge from that Slate windbag was more than enough.

I found the canyonesque holes in logic in "The Reader" far more disturbing. Consider that the viewer is asked to believe that a lawyer defending his client being charged with some of the most heinous crimes in human history would not know his own client's foible which is so basic to his representation? How did she get not one but two government jobs without the ability?

The trial was a media circus but her lover didn't know she was charged when it was part of his law school syllabus to attend?

THe person was more ashamed of this rather common inability than the crimes she committed which she freely admitted?

I wish that damned bus had crashed into that courtroom.

To Sean, on his dismissal of Stephanie Zacharek's dissing of Heath Ledger's performance

This is a thinly-veiled attempt for Stephanie Zacharek to appear wildly contrarian and edgy--perhaps "going against the grain." It's just arrogant. Why don't we ask the actors who shared the screen with Heath and the actors who nominated him for a Screen Actors Guild award whether they think his performance is "good, not great"?

Yeah, but she's entitled to her opinion. If it happens to disagree with that of Christopher Nolan, you, and 99% of the rest of the universe, that still doesn't invalidate it.

In reply to
Dane Walker on January 12, 2009 5:15 PM
[insert 8 to 10 paragraphs extolling the coherence of The Dark Knight or else the ridiculousness of wanting coherence in a comic book film here]

[insert sentence about how film critic shouldn't be wasting time by writing 8 to 10 paragraphs denigrating coherence of The Dark Knight or else extolling the virtue of coherence in comic book, or any kind, of film here]

I remember reading an article by Isaac Asimov about the comments he received when he wrote a neutral review of Star Wars and a negative review of Battlestar Galactica (the first one).

I'm not going to quote it, because I don't have the source material on hand. But it went something like this: One and all, they decried my complaining about the lack of scientific accuracy [JMW: such as small one man space ships operating in the vacuum of space and turning like WWII aircraft]. "Why are you complaining, Dr. Asimov? It's only science fiction!" God that hurts! Can you imagine what it's like to spend a lifetime reading science fiction, writing science fiction, loving science fiction and getting "It's only science fiction!" It's only science fiction, so it's allowed to be stupid and inane. It's only science fiction, so it's allowed to appeal only to 5 year olds.

Graphic novels, comics, call 'em what you want...and movies based on them. If all we ask of them is an entertainment level suitable to 5 year olds, then that is what we'll get. Personally, I'd rather be a little more challenged than that.

In reply to Don on January 12, 2009 5:44 PM
Jim, I am so glad Roger Ebert returned to his website to continue posting his reviews instead of your shallow criticisms

If you don't want to talk about movies (even if you disagree with the person doing the analysis), why are you here? I'm confoozed.

Jim, you replied to Rollie, saying, ...the dust would not be a significant distraction if you assume all the bus drivers are by hired by the Joker and show up when they do as an exquisitely timed part of his plan. My question would be: Why did the filmmakers deliberately add the sound of children to the soundtrack? They would not have done it unless they felt it needed to be done, so what were the reasons?

Actually, the way I see it, the Joker needs only one bus driver paid off...the one who slows down and creates the gap. Maybe a second as a backup. The ones in front are just doing their jobs, and the ones behind are going to slow down too - unless they want to create a traffic accident.

As for the sound of children, I like to think of it as a soundtrack of Joker's state of mind. Here he is, driving away in a schoolbus with millions of the mob's money, and he's quietly imagining himself safely ensconced in the midst of a bunch of school kids to make his getaway.

In other words, he's gloating.

Quick, Robin! To the next entry!

JE: That's a clever reading, that Gotham schoolkids are sucked up into the plan without knowing (or, at least, caring) about how their busses are taking them home. Then again, maybe the kids know their busses have been hijacked... and they love it, as a break from the rountine! Originally, I just thought the Joker's buss pulled into the line of real schoolbusses that just happened to be passing by on schedule at that moment. Others have suggested ways they find it more believableL 1) that all the bus drivers are hired by the Joker; or 2) that the drivers are hired by the joker, but they are not actually driving schoolbusses full of schoolkids.... Lots of ways to look at it.

That's a clever reading, that Gotham schoolkids are sucked up into the plan with knowing (or, at least, caring) about how their busses are taking them home

Clever, but not one you agree with, Jim? (which is okay)

But...I'm trying to keep it fairly simple, compared to some of the other theories. Rather than have an omniscient Joker, or a Joker who has resources to hire a charter a bunch of school busses (as other posters here have proposed and - properly - dismissed as unrealistic, I just propose a Joker who is able to plan based on a regularly scheduled of procession of school busses that are going from their depot to the area schools, following a regular route that takes them past the bank at a certain time every day. Then he rents 1 school bus, suborns 1 or 2 drivers, and makes the getaway.

Actually, a poster named Mark made the point that there are no children on the busses. To me, the sound of schoolchildren, absent any actual children on the busses, points rather obviously to "mood music" - and the only person who realizes what's happened and is still around to have mood music about it is the Joker. So he's imagining the sound of school kids having fun just to "complete the effect" as it were.

I have to watch the movie again, which I admit I've been putting off. I have issues with the movie, as you do, Jim. And I don't want to watch it, have those issues confirmed, and be disappointed even more.

But, if memory serves, the Joker spends the whole movie playing the equivalent of the football "play-action pass". I can't seem to put it in words - I've tried and erased 2 or 3 sentences so far. Try this: Joker knows how people react to someone like him. He accounts for that in his planning and his actual plan and goal is completely opposite to what the other people in the movie expect.

And so the sound of school children is like the "against the grain" cherry on top of the bank robbery. School children laughing and playing is exactly the opposite emotional resonance expected from someone who just robbed organized crime and killed 6 people. Coming as it does at the beginning of the movie, I think it serves as a warning that with the Joker nothing is what it appears to be.

But, as for the wood and dust and stuff on top of the bus, and the bus' apparent ability to plow through the front of a buildling without scratching paint...well, there's not much to say to that. If we want to try to continue suspending disbelief, we can assume he rented a Kryptonian bus...

JE: I neither agree nor disagree with any theory about the schoolchildren, though I really like what you say about the "against the grain" effect of their voices on the soundtrack. Although we don't know it at this point in the movie, clearly the Joker's minions are capable of setting up anything the movie wants them to, so (in the movie's terms) it's quite possible that all the bus drivers in District 22 have been in the Joker's employ, perhaps for years, just waiting for this moment. That's as easy to believe as the alternative idea that all the regular bus drivers had been replaced on that one day without anybody noticing...

Looks like I'm late to the party...

If you want to pull out a shot that doesn't make sense, take a look at the scene where Batman, Gordon, and Dent all meet on the roof. The camera circles around, and around them... for no apparent reason. That's the one that stuck out like a sore thumb to me, even on first viewing.

JE: For the first half-hour of the movie I wanted to strangle Nolan for recycling that shot (with the Joker and Rachel at the fundraiser, too). Felt like a one-trick pony.

Fact 1: The pretty mean trick in the bag for any blogger/article-writer nowadays is to pick a
grudge either on or against 'The Dark Knight(2008)' and you get hoards of responses n hits on
your website.

Fact 2: The Dark Knight(2008) has been nominated for EIGHT Oscars including: Ledger for Acting, Cinematography, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Visual Effects.

Well there goes for a toss, your criticism of TDK in those fields! They are invalid now. THAT says something about the film being worthy enough and says something about Stephanie(who?) being incompetent due to her unreliable remarks and now I don't even care about that small technical detail like the children's voices that Jim perceives are coming from the buSSes as long as TDK has a fair chance of win an Oscar for SOUND EDITING n SOUND MIXING. Experts know better.
Ofcourse, Stephanie is entitled to her opinion, but her incompetitive comment surely invalidates her competency to hold the position of a film-critic.

("it's (Ledger's performance is)repetitive, building or stretching toward nothing")- Stephanie

...And what does Stephanie(me-scratching my head) actually mean by this? That is a First (type of analysis) for me. Was Ledger having sex or something that he was supposed to reach a climax or crescendo?

Fact 3: All our interactions in this world are MAJORLY psychological first and then a REMAINING SMALL part physical.

If a predominant action-movie's soul does not connect to a film-critic's psyche, especially a FEMALE critic's, then I can understand her precarious predicament. The Female Psyche is
naturally programmed to shun violence. Only their Day-job or Male-Dominance are the two factors that make females accept and bear violence in real life. And here is a female who forcefully has to go thro' mechanically watching innumerable such movies from Hollywood (atleast), just to rate them WITHOUT ENJOYING THEM. And 'Batman' is majorly a testosterone-based male-issue.

By the way, TDK had 94% support of critics (RottenTomatoes.com).

Fact 4: A steel bus will never be dented by some fancy Bank-door woodwork even by bulldozing through it.(And the "Bus-driver Hiring" Theory has been explained above a lot by many.)And the basic Modus Operandi of 'Looting A Bank' everywhere is mostly an identical process, whether it's movies like TDK, Heat(1995) or just real life.

To be an agent of Chaos and Confusion, one necessarily must not follow chaotic life himself.
The Joker is truly an intelligent apathetic guy. And he has his options calculated beforehand.
Before he takes any action. He is not a total psycho. It's just that he is apthetic towards human life as a whole. TDK occurs SIX MONTHS after Batman Begins(2005). The Joker utilises those six months for resourceful planning. And no, this is not an assumption, this is a fact.

See? This point explains a lot, if not all, of
the TDK events.

Even though I am big, big Bat-fan, I know that Batman cannot exist in real life, NOT because he is Impossible but because he is LESS PROBABLE.

And did Nolan break any of Newton's 3 laws or any other Physics law that he did not justify and so should be crucified? He didn't seem to.

Nolan has showed us the Less Probable, not the Impossible.

Fact 5: (Supported by Fact 3) Some things/events in life (and movies) are better off experienced
mentally/pyschologically/PERCEPTUALLY than to actually watch them occur mechanically in front of our eyes. Otherwise that diminishes the joy of experiencing those events.

Batman has been written since the 1930s till date. Every plot and planning in the frenetically FAST-PACED TDK cannot be explained on-screen in just a span of 2-n-half hours. Some aspects are to supposed to be taken for granted and assumed in movies/life. Some peoples' analytical thinking simply did not move at TDK's pace and hence they found it more clueless than it actually IS. It's amazing that I have to explain this fact to a film critic (that is if you are one). Maybe Mr. Jim is just accustomed to watch only hardcore documentaries on CNN-BBC. So he finds ALL movies difficult to digest. Mr. Jim, since you are going to start a whole series on TDK's faults, before that considering you have that much spare time, could you just name ANY ONE of your's TOP-20-movies-of-All-Time that is flawless ? All I need is just ONE title (to claw at).

By your standards, Lord of The Rings must be the worst movie of all time then, right? A bag full of plotholes, there! Atleast Nolan tried to insert some kind of realism into his Bat-series.

To a art connoisseur, what should matter first and the last, is whether there are HONEST intention/efforts on the part of scriptwriter and director to dish out a drama TRUTHFUL TO ITS UNIVERSE AND ORIGIN. If they succeed in that, all the analysis of minor technical details/goofs can wait...forever. Nolan and Goyer have passed that test as far as a Bat-fan and a watcher of critically acclaimed movies like me is concerned. And no, I was NOT refering to BOX OFFICE SUCCESS here and here, I never will.

And what is that criticism about the cell-phone-sonar concept, calling it rubbish and on that basis calling the whole movie trash? That's a ridiculous attempt at best. I daresay, if anyone has the guts to dismiss any sci-fi issue in a movie, let them try their hands at a real scientific movie like Spielberg's masterpiece 'Artificial Intelligence(2001)' and prove their point. And yes, I am a Physics Post-Graduate in AI, asking you to do that.

And before analysing TDK again, please refer to THE TOP 25 critically acclaimed Bat-novels at IGN.COM. Reading those 25 books is enough to understand Bat-universe. I did that. There is NO necessity of reading all the Bat-comics since the 1930s or BEING A FANBOY TO APPRECIATE TDK.

...And yes, the sound of children inspiteof there being no children in the buSSes was not a technical mistake.

IT WAS A SYMBOLIC PIECE OF SOUND.

A film critic must be familiar with such sound effects, especially at the end of a particular scene.

I have experienced such sound effects in numerous enough movies.

The sound represented what The Joker wants the outside world, that was unaware of his workings, was to assume when it sees the Plain Old Regular Yellow Steel School Buses. For the outside world, it was supposed to be business as usual. The sound was the POV of the external world.

Also it represented the stealthiness/cunningness of The Joker that helped him to merge so perfectly unnoticed into the external world using children as camouflage.

Also there is no necessity of analysing where actually the bus was emerging from. It's simple. If a bus enters a bank then if the same bus is exiting out of something in the very next frame then it can be safely assumed that : The bus emerged from the same ... Bank.

It's a movie, not a Reuters documentary.

So the Bus Emerging Scene is Perfect with no mistakes and errors.

it really isn't that big of a deal! obviously the driver behind the joker was also in on the heist because there is "a perfect gap". also, this is just a movie, its fine! the only thing is all of the people walking by don't seem to notice a school bus in a wall, but besides that, its all movie magic and "part of the plan" ~ the joker

~Patrick

What the hell was batman trying to achieve by trying to cut through the side of scarecrows van with that little saw when he was driving off? Its hillarious.