Word: batmans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When it comes to the hugely hyped opening of the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, the question is who's crazier: the mad, murderous Joker portrayed by the late Heath Ledger, or the mad, manic fanboys who insist on lining up for hours just to see the film at 2, 3 or 6 a.m. on its opening morning...
Fanboys and genre mavens have been well attended to in this summer movie season, which was launched with Jon Favreau's Iron Man on May 2 and is likely to reach a climax next week with the Batman sequel The Dark Knight. Today they're lining up for Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Many in this prime demographic - 14- to 24-year-old males - have already seen Guillermo del Toro's funny freak show at one of the Thursday midnight screenings that have become obligatory for action films...
...really. This villain, as conceived by Nolan and his scriptwriter brother Jonathan and incarnated with chilling authority by Ledger, is not the elegant sadist of so many action films, nor the strutting showman played by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman. He isn't a father figure or a macho man. And though he invents several stories about how he got his (facial and psychic) scars, he's not presented as the sum of injustices done to him. This Joker is simply one of the most twisted and mesmerizing creeps in movie history...
...Joker may be insane, but he's a shrewd judge of character. He knows that Batman has two vulnerable spots: his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, assuming the role Katie Holmes had in the first film) and his hidden identity. So the Joker starts preying on Rachel, and he says he'll stop terrorizing Gotham if Batman will come out from under the mask. A modest request from the bin Laden of movie villains, yet Bruce is reluctant. Or rather, the film is, since the informing principle of any franchise is perpetuation of the series. No secret, no Batman - just...
...teens and adults, it's a strap-yourselves-in trip, handsome and assured as only a big-budget picture can be. (Part of it was shot in the IMAX process, which lends the action scenes a startling clarity and depth.) And for reassurance, Nolan brings back old friends from Batman Begins: Michael Caine as Bruce's butler Alfred and Morgan Freeman as Fox, who takes care of Bruce's toys...