Word: darkeness
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There's a beautiful high-angle shot, early in The Dark Knight, that looks down on Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in full Batman regalia as he perches atop a Gotham skyscraper, surveying the city he lives to protect, then leaping off and spreading his majestic bat wings to swoop down into the night. Bruce's trajectory is also the film's. It traces a descent into moral anarchy, and each of its major characters will hit bottom. Some will never recover, broken by the touch of evil or by finding it, like a fatal infection, in themselves...
...More important than its homages to Hollywood classics may be WALL-E's status as an example of the kind of films Hollywood rarely makes anymore: well-crafted stories for a mass audience. Filmgoers, it seems, have to choose between smart but dark, strange, independent or quasi-independent films, like last year's Best Picture, No Country for Old Men, or mind-numbing popcorn flicks, like the latest superhero offering from Will Smith, Hancock. WALL-E, however, seems to be stimulating both hearts and minds...
...just my cinematic diet that tends to turn my thoughts dark. Environmental reporting will give you an apocalyptic mind-set. There's the melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels; torched rainforests and polluted Chinese megalopolises. Animals going extinct - gone forever, a mini-apocalypse - up to 10,000 times faster than the rate believed over the past 60 million years. When we talk about climate change, we're not just talking about rising temperatures or altered landscapes. We're talking about the end of human civilization as we know it. That's what all those PowerPoint slides in An Inconvenient...
...Caraqueños, as residents of the capital are known, recognize that the logic is strange. But when you have to walk up the steep, serpentine roads that are the only access to most of the poor hillside barrios that ring the city, after dark, hopping over open sewers, passing houses that have no running water or paved floors, the company of a dead malandro might seem comforting. It certainly beats pleading for your life with a living...
...that is exactly the kind of talk that concerns Tancredo, who has announced that he will be leaving Congress after this term to try to clamp down on illegal immigration at the state and local level. He plans to continue to warn McCain, raising the dark specter of Republicans failing to show up at the polls in November. "It's awfully shaky," Tancredo says of the Republican base. "That's why I think it is disastrous to do something that gets into the 'comprehensive' approach...